Grant Blakeman is a designer & developer

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Principal Design Engineer, Principal Design Engineer Principal Product Designer, Senior Staff Design Engineer, LinkedIn

Helping LinkedIn’s product teams build with AI and helping AI build with design systems.

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Staff Design Engineer, Staff Design Engineer Staff Product Designer, Staff Design Engineer, LinkedIn

Creating internal tools for LinkedIn’s design teams. As the first full-time Design Engineer at LinkedIn, I’m working to expand our portfolio beyond Figma plugins and into other interesting areas, all in the service of making designer’s lives easier and helping them get their work in the hands of engineers faster and at a higher level of craft and quality.

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Design Engineer, Design Engineer Product Designer, Design Engineer, LinkedIn (contract)

Internal tools for LinkedIn design teams. I started working with the Figma Plugin API at its launch and built out a suite of tools to help LinkedIn Design transition from Sketch to Figma, while improving engineering handoff and protecting user privacy. My work on these tools established the quality bar and best practices for Design Engineering at LinkedIn.

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Engineer, Designer, and Owner, Interdiscipline

Indie development & design studio. I have worked independently, consulting with clients, startups, and other studios for the bulk of my career.

Select projects & contracts while independent

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Design and Engineering, The Radavist

Completely redesigned, re-architected, and rebuilt the popular online cycling publication. Reduced infrastructure costs while improving site responsiveness.

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Frontend Engineering, Superplastic

Built and maintained a fully-custom ecommerce site on Shopify (with many side quests) for this collectible vinyl art toy company, from the founder of Kid Robot.

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Frontend Engineering, Ello

Maintained the social network’s React app as the solo frontend engineer during this period, fixing bugs and building out new features part-time.

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Product Design and Frontend Engineering, Highrise (37signals)

New feature development for an aging Rails app and static marketing site during Highrise’s brief stint as an independent subsidiary of 37signals.

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Backend Architecture and Engineering, Huckle & Goose

Designed the backend architecture for a SaaS meal planning client and then built out the backend/CMS for the service. Also provided frontend strategy consulting.

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Frontend and Backend Engineering, BMoCA (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art)

Created a custom CMS for this small museum to curate an online portfolio of its exhibitions and events—past/present—with a unique, highly-interactive frontend.

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Frontend and Backend Engineering, Budnitz Bicycles

Built a system allowing customers to build (configure), save, share, and buy their high-end, custom bicycle designs, based on options managed by the Budnitz team.

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Brand and Product Design, Frontend and Backend Engineering,
Lilly’s Table (Technical Co-Founder, contract)

Designed the brand, worked on business strategy with my founder chef client, designed the product, and then built the frontend and backend of this SaaS app.

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Leadership, Product, and Engineering, Forge Group (Co-Founder)

A volunteer organization to build software enabling political action. Our first idea was Switchboard: an app that would take your name and zip code and automatically connect you with your local congressperson over the phone.

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Product, Design, and Frontend Engineering, Hilite (Co-Founder)

Part Pinterest-for-words, part link-blog, Hilite was a self-funded startup that allowed you to follow individuals or categorized “stacks” of quotes on topics you picked. The basis for each post had to be a quoted section of a publicly-accessible website.

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Product, Design, and Engineering, Backstage (Co-Founder)

Founded and built a platform for indie bands to promote and sell their music/merch, giving them a direct connection to their fans that iTunes wouldn’t allow them.

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Graphic Designer and Art Director, HaifleighBrandWorks

I started my career in traditional graphic design, print design, brand identity, and brand storytelling. It continues to influence how I think about product design and development.