Hello...
So we have finally made it. Isn't it sparkling and shiny? I'm a little proud of this new 'me' space. I will use it, I pinky swear, to show you what some of my abilities are. I hope for it to be a story... the story of Aaron Vanderzwan, the designer / developer.
Alas, it is still in the process of being built. Despite that truth, I thought I would push it out not only to prod myself to finish it but also so that people who are researching me have something interesting to look at. Use the < and > nav arrows for now.
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 'only a developer' and into the cycle of design. I am 25 years old and have been in the 'real life' workplace for three years now. I am currently working at Conduit Studios in Grand Rapids, MI. 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. I believe that jQuery is a great tool to build a unique experience for users and so have spent some time building some plugins. My skill set has evolved over the years and now includes, Ruby on Rails applications, custom Wordpress CMS, and pretty much any other framework you can throw my way.
Whats Your Art?
This project was created 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.
Sebago
I built the user interface for the international footwear company, Sebago. They are known for their famous shoe, the dockside.
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).
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:
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