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:

• Berger & Föhr
• BMoCA
• Budnitz Bicycles
• Cast Iron Design
• COMMON (Alex Bogusky)
• Ello
• GAN (formerly Global Accelerator Network)
• Highrise (a 37signals / Basecamp product)
• Huckle & Goose
• JK Editions
• TBWA/Chiat/Day
• Threadless
• Whole Foods Market

Let’s work together.

/now

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.

🤟 Three Things

1. House of Rain – Recommended to me by my sister, this book gave me a fresh perspective on the Four Corners region of the American Southwest and the ancient indigenous peoples we call “Anasazi”.
2. LA Tourist Race - Mike did a killer job putting together a fun event and, despite my DNF, I’m excited for the next one.
3. Anxy’s Masculinity Issue - This is my first exposure to Anxy and it’s beautifully assembled.

✅ Studio Status

Currently taking inquiries and booking new work. Say hello.

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Last update on February 6, 2019

/now is inspired by Derek Sivers’ concept of the same name, with a few additions. I intend to update it regularly, but infrequently.