hello there!

I'm Carl and I've been front-endish since 1996 – the glory days of Geocities. I'm one of those annoying folks that really cares about the semantic usage of HTML elements, and I build thoughtful reusable CSS (nothing quite like making some branding changes to a shared custom library which multiple applications pull in as a git submodule and it just works^tm). It's pretty common for me to swap hats on a gig including: research and analysis, ux/persona development, information/site architecture, content strategy, writing copy, site configuration, devops, and non-critical sysadmin.

Being a jack of all trades works great with small teams. There often isn't a need to have a dedicated person for each role and being able to hand off tasks to myself ends up saving clients time, money, and obviously lowers miscommunication. Once I'm far enough into a visual design I can switch to developing in browser vs creating yet more artifacts that will never make it to production.

Soft skills are often undervalued in the field - I can explain to a non-technical product owner why their approved visual design needs to be changed for UX reasons and play well with others. I assume that you are probably here because someone told you about me, so hopefully you trust their judgement. :)

web application prototyping

I usually shift quickly into designing with code once any novel problems are solved and the general visual direction is set via graphical comps. Years of developing for the web, keeping up with technology, and a genuine passion for content and how people interact with it help me shape functional requirements into something that people want to use. I can deliver Sketch (or similar visual design) comps or production level HTML & CSS handed off to developers.

I've recently had a 3+ year contract with a central IT team at UCLA. Some artifacts of that work are the UI for their Shibboleth Single Sign-On System and the initial release of their online self-service management tool. While a lot of what I've been doing recently has been internally facing, these projects were designed publicly using static site generators which allowed me to quickly gather feedback from stakeholders.

content management system work

I've used many many systems over the years, but recently mostly work with Drupal for larger projects and Wordpress for smaller ones. I was lead front-end developer for a redesign of UCSF.edu built on Drupal 7 and have worked on similar larger complex Drupal sites. For smaller scale projects I usually handle the entire process including content strategy, information architeture, migration, site-building, and theming.

A surprising number of websites don't need the overhead a modern database driven CMS brings - I built out a Jekyll internal documentation system for Looker and most of my personal side projects are static.

user experience research

This usually gets tagged on the beginning of a design or development project to help inform development, but I've been invited as part of a small experienced team doing in-depth client interviews for a multimillion dollar corporation in Honolulu as part of a pure UX contract as well. Years of turning functional requirements into products gave me the perspective to delve into what the functional requirements truly were.

contact

You can send me an email @ obscura@duck.com.