Hello...
So we have finally made it. I'm a little proud of this new 'me' space. I will use it, I swear, to express who I am and what my abilities are. My hope is that this 'sitelet' will tell a story... the story of Aaron Vanderzwan, the designer / developer.
If you are interested in more casual content, feel free to check out my other 'me' space at http://www.aaronvanderzwan.com/blog/.
A quick history
I like to consider myself an interactivity designer. I design experiences through code. A print designer is not only a photoshop-er, nor am I only a developer. My skills, abilities, and passions go beyond that, outside of the range of a web developer through the cycle of design. I am 25 years old and have been in the 'real life' workplace for a number of years now. I am currently working at Conduit Studios in Grand Rapids, MI with two genius designers John O'Neill and Tim Carpenter. Before Conduit, I spent a few years working at People Design... also in Grand Rapids, MI. I am very meticulous about how well my work is constructed.
The skillset
Development
I am an advanced developer and have learned to learn quickly. My skillset is always growing and changing. My most recent addition to the array of development tools that I use is Flash Actionscript 3.0. I really think that jQuery is such a great tool to build a unique and meaningful web experiences for users. Also on my belt are a few Ruby on Rails applications, custom Wordpress CMS, Sharepoint templating, and pretty much any other framework you can throw my way.
Design
I am a well rounded interactive designer. A lot of people will argue that designers and developers think too differently for one person to be good at both, but my experience shows me that having a greater knowledge of how things are done will only make your design more rich and interesting. With my attention to detail, my designs are tight and will communicate your strengths. I am extremly in tune with how you have market yourself in order to create new pieces that fit your current brand / identity and what you are looking to move towards in the future.
Thoughts
There is good work and then there is great work... work that will get you by and work that is professional. The difference is in the details. A website begins to feel professional when someone takes the time to ensure that every detail is perfect, spacing in between images and text, clean image crops, tight typography... these are all examples of what can make a good website great. Being in the design world my entire career has made recognizing these design details second nature; something doesn't feel right when it isn't looking professional.
Stylex Seating
Stylex Seating is a versatile office furniture company based out of New Jersey. This project was built on a custom CMS that dynamically writes content to static html files to speed up load speeds and lower database and server load. Released for NeoCon World's Trade Fair 2010, it is a perfect representation of Stylex's beautiful products and also a display of the quality of work that Conduit Studios produces. Take a look.
Went live: Monday, June 7, 2010
CatDogBearSnake
Jason Murray, a brilliant designer / artist and owner of CatDogBearSnake.com, recently relocated to L.A from Grand Rapids, MI. He asked me to help him get his work onto the web. I built a very simple PHP content management solution since he just needed one page with 'projects' on it. Simple image uploads, drag and drop ordering and control for where each item is placed on the page (left and bottom margin) makes this website easily customizable. He can add a vimeo code to add video as well. It was a fun project and I think the final product looks amazing.
Went live: Tuesday, June 17, 2010
NACC
The North American Choral Company is a local choir company in Grand Rapids that focuses on teaching children the art of singing together. Conduit was tasked with rebuilding their existing website and taking the reigns on the NACC branding. A low budget project, it uses CushyCMS, an extremely simple content management tool and a few very simple php templates. The logo work was designed to exude the excitement that the children have for their music. It is nice to get these very basic clean sites every once in a while to help bring you back to the fundamentals of web design and web building.
Went live: Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Steelcase.com
After Conduit Studios designed the site, I was tasked to build the entire user interface for Steelcase's new website. This included all of the Javascript, CSS, plenty of image cropping and a whole lot of responsibility. We used jQuery 1.4.2 for all of the animations. Once I had all of the templates built out I worked with Ryan Hullah to get the templates to look accurate in Steelcase's content management system, Sharepoint. Ryan did an amazing job making Sharepoint work with a custom design. My proudest feature is the slider that you see on the homepage (and other places on the site). I actually built a custom slider plugin, based off of the very well built jQuery Cycle plugin.
Went live: Monday, March 15, 2010
What's Your Art?
I worked with John O'Neill from Conduit Studios in a partnership with Plenty Creative to create this graphic rich website for the Arts Council of Grand Rapids. It is a website devoted to promoting art organizations and artists local to Grand Rapids. This website allows users to navigate the upcoming art shows and learn how to get more involved in GR's downtown life.
Went live: Thursday, January 28, 2010
Sebago
I built the user interface for the international footwear company, Sebago. They are known for their quality products and classic designs. After I finished templating the user interface locally, I worked with the great guys at CQL to get it hooked up to Sebago's content management system. This project had to work seemlessly with IE back to IE6 which was a challenge with some of the newer technologies. My favorite work is on the grid page, the mini color slider/selector.
Went live: Friday, December 5, 2009
Bates Footwear
Bates Footwear focuses on service performance footwear. I built the UI for this site as well as a few jQuery plugins to automatically re-render dropdowns as lists (and update form before submit, etc).
Went live: Thursday, November 12, 2009
Pop Scholars
Pop Scholars is an incredibly gifted improv group in Grand Rapids. I designed and built this website to give them entire control over the content. Using wordpress as the CMS, the guys can update any piece of content they wish.
People Design
I built PeopleDesign.com on the Wordpress blogging platform because Wordpress is a free, extremely well built and super simple to use system that doubles as a basic CMS.
MaxImage
I am loving jQuery as a tool to enhance the user interfaces of websites. I have built multiple plugins for code that I seem to reuse regularly. One of them MaxImage Image Scaling dynamically resizes images so that it will be as large as possible, relative to the size of the browser. You can try it out at the demo page. Go ahead, resize your browser window and see the image change size. I have also built other plugins for personal use. You can find me using 'FocusMagic', 'SelectReplace', 'MaxGrid', a cookie based accordion, 'Slider' (used for this website), and more. Adding to this library of custom tools has greatly enhanced my ability to build websites efficiently and intelligently.
Audtonic
A personal side project of mine, Audtonic (built in Rails) is a way to automatically get notified when your favorite musical artists release new albums. This is a project that unfortunately takes a back seat to funded projects, but is still something I love to work on.
More to come...
I am constantly working on more projects. Stay tuned!
We'll talk for hours
I'm always looking for great new projects and fun people to work with. If you've got a website you want built, or if you just want to talk about life over a beer. Let me know.
phone: 616.780.2920
email: akv292 @ gmail dot com
LinkedIn profile
Resumé
VCF of my contact info
More Info:
Blog | Twitter | Music taste
