gb
Circle one: Yes No Maybe
A developer & designer.
Based in Los Angeles.
Say hello.
Circle one: Yes No Maybe
A developer & designer.
Based in Los Angeles.
Say hello.
My name is Grant Blakeman. I work as an independent developer & designer, based in Los Angeles, California.
Over the last twelve years my focus has been on the web—designing and building custom interfaces and user experiences for everything from small startups to established products and large companies.
I am comfortable joining existing teams, building my own, or working solo. I have experience in product design, backend and frontend development, and particularly enjoy roles that intersect some or all of these disciplines.
A few clients and collaborative partners:
It’s a cold day in Los Angeles—I know, but really for LA temps in the 40s are cold. LA feels like a foreign land when weather moves in. Cold or rain or grey, it becomes a different place. It’s as if the ethos of Los Angeles is inexorably tied to the warmth and the sun. Without those elements the city ceases to be LA and something else entirely takes its place.
Bundled up and walking around the city, I temporarily cannot recognize it. My head is swirling with the chaotic thoughts of “now”. My professional “now” is more a list of “coming soon”. I am deep into the build phase of a client project I am really excited about, but with a backlog of spinning plates: pitching new work, designing a site for a passion project with my sister (opening up this spring), rebranding my own work practice, and scheming about yet another “new thing” idea that I can’t expunge from my brain.
In the organized chaos, one theme is emerging: I feel uniquely open to the new: ready for fresh challenges, new ways of working, new collaborations, new new.
🤓 Technical Tangent
To my surprise, I have recently found myself working in Wordpress. I hadn’t touched the platform in at least 10 years, but it made the most sense to keep a client on it and now here we are. So, I made a deep dive into the current state-of-affairs around hosting and theme building. Wordpress is still Wordpress, but the research has been a surprisingly-fruitful undertaking. I’ve strapped some modern tooling onto theme building. The result is a workflow with Sass, ES6, proper asset management, linting, continuous integration, and modern deployment techniques. Props to Jonathan Brennan’s blanket for sending me down this path. I forked it and have been fiddling a bunch. Other notables: Trellis from Roots, and the S3-Uploads/Tachyon combo from Human Made.
Currently taking inquiries and booking new work. Say hello.
/now is inspired by Derek Sivers’ concept of the same name, with a few additions. I intend to update it regularly, but infrequently.
grantblakeman.com is designed in code with frequent browser refreshing. It is typeset in a single size, weight, color, and style of Freight Sans Pro Book from GarageFonts. I photographed the image visible in the site’s meta share sheet. The photo location is the Arts District neighborhood in Los Angeles.
The site is static and structured for speed. It is built as simply as possible using Sass, javascript (no frameworks), and compiled with Jekyll. Building and deploying the site is handled automagically with CircleCI. The CI server uploads the site to S3 and it is then served to you through the CloudFront CDN. Your device talks to a server that is as physically close as possible to you in the world—every little bit matters. There is a staging environment and if you’re lucky you might catch some work in-progress.
If you’ve read this far, you probably need some kittens as a reward.
Oh, and be sure to find the easter eggs… 👀
A note on privacy: This website collects no analytics, serves no javascript from 3rd-party servers, and only uses javascript locally (no server communication once it is loaded in your browser).