When work was thin, I worked in textbooks. I spent three years placing manuscript into templates and stylizing the text. The work was dull and repetitive and nothing made it tolerable. Even so, I came to appreciate thorough, well-considered style sheets and clear, uniformly marked-up manuscript.
The discipline and care that I learned those three years affected my later web site work. A colleague integrating my HTML with a Rails back-end called my markup “immaculate.” Enough thought went into the code that I wasn’t ashamed to agree.
Besides serving a handful of freelance clients, I’ve worked in-house for Chicago’s Thirdwave, LLC, and Designkitchen to produce sites for AIGA, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Oprah, and Motorola.
At Thirdwave I scripted and implemented a critical feature for the site of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP, refactored much of AIGA Chicago, and gave NivenLink a solid start.
Designkitchen hired me as a production designer for Oprah Winfrey’s O Ambassadors. When time came to design the site’s CMS, I asked for access to the HTML. Within a month I’d left their design team for front-end development, coding most of the original Oprah’s Angel Network’s front-end, the Motorola Video Surveillance and award-winning Ultra-Broadband Solutions microsites, and a handful of other sites.
I am also fun.
Good clients are a privilege, and I’ve been privileged more than once. Mine include a three-screen theatre in an Iowa river town, a suburban showcase theatre, and a small law firm. I lend my hands to 826Chicago on occasion, my HTML helps many people looking for a church find one in Wicker Park, and I’m helping a group of Lutheran clergy realize their vision of a journal committed to theological discourse.
Marketers can try to game search (there is no game) and technologists can have the Singularity; I build this stuff for humans. I want technology to be useful and fun and to leave me alone when I’m done with it.
At the end of two years of graduate study, I’m easing back into freelance front-end web site development and eager to see where it takes me next. My résumé is available for viewing.