Tania Schlatter and Debby Levinson

Visual design, usability and engineering have different perspectives and practices, and are often at odds with one another – but designing successful applications that people depend on and enjoy using requires all three disciplines.

If you're not a designer by trade, but design web applications, you'll want to learn the principles of consistency, hierarchy, and personality – the keys to great web app design. Dive deep into the elements of visual user interface design to learn how to affect how people perceive and use your applications through typography, color, styling, imagery and layout.

This workshop will provide lectures and hands-on exercises that will help you make design decisions; create an appropriate personality; place buttons and other elements effectively; know when and how to use a grid; get the best out of standards and themes; select a font; pick a color palette; select and use graphics/imagery.

Learn the language and principles that designers use to take the guesswork out of application design. Bring your questions, laptops (Mac or PC), pencils, blank paper and a pair of scissors to this interactive and informative session.

Tania Schlatter and Debby Levinson are principals and co-founders of Nimble Partners, a user experience design firm committed to making technology and information work for people. They work with software development, higher education and non-profit organizations to design web applications and information-rich sites that help people work, find and learn. Clients have included Endeca Technologies, over 14 offices at MIT, Tufts University, Umbra, and Curaspan Healthgroup. Tania and Debby have been on the front lines of the many changes in communication design in their careers. Tania started designing with mechanicals and typesetting for offset print design, Debby started in desktop publishing, and both moved on to web and dynamic application design with personalization technology pioneers ATG.

Tania received a BFA from Boston University College of Fine Arts and a master of design in human-centered communication design from Illinois Institute of Technology, which means she's good with Helvetica and knows a lot of cool ways to involve users in the design process. Her work has been published in Interactions magazine, Print magazine and How magazine, and recognized by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the University and College Designer's Association (UCDA).

Debby has been bringing designers, engineers and communicators together for the past 15 years. She is an MIT graduate with an unusual degree – a bachelor's in creative writing – so she's a geek, but one who expresses herself through the written word more than through code. She is a co-author of The MIT Guide to Teaching Web Site Design, published by the MIT Press in April 2001.