Portfolio of Shane Becker

I helped launch buzz.com. I wrote a lot of the front end markup and styles (a duty shared with Chad Crissman). I was mostly tasked with turning Photoshop and/or Illustrator comps into actual web pages. (A process that I think is very dated and needs to go away.) I designed a handful of pages or widgets. Those were designed and implemented directly in the browser. Photoshop was only harmed when a graphic element was needed and couldn't be made using pure CSS. We mostly used a lightweight version of kanban for team organization.

We completely rebuilt and redesigned buzz.com. It's not quite live so I can't show screenshots yet. I drove all of the design. I wrote most of the HTML and CSS (again, working with Chad Crissman). I used minimal HTML5 and CSS3 to keep the pages light and fast. @media queries were used to serve up the same HTML page to mobile devices but reformatted somewhat to work with the smaller screen. Microformats and ARIA roles were used wherever appropriate.

In the last few months at AT&T Interactive, my time was split between buzz.com and yp.com. On YP, I built a lightweight version of the homepage for users on a slow connection, I.E., modem users. Yes, modem users in 2010. The result was YP Lite. Also, along with Chad Crissman again, I spruced up the 403, 404 and 500 error pages to add a little personality to those moments where we totally fell down and failed the user. Additionally, I worked on some internal dashboards.

Some of my non-technical duties (sometimes self appointed) were to advocate for the user in the face of feature creep or date slip, to push best practices in markup and style, to demonstrate designing in the browser and to the capability of the browser. I introduced and implemented @media queries and the idea of using just CSS to target screens of different sizes and orientations. As my final act at the company I did a round of trainings on HTML Basics, the new HTML5 stuff, CSS Basics and the new CSS3 things.

Rubinius Homepage

Rubinius needed a better marketing promotional site for their big 1.0 launch. This was that. As a side note, the J and K buttons can be used to move up and down to previous and next sections. All design, HTML and CSS by me.

Contact : Evan Phoenix

LA.rb Homepage

Evan Phoenix and I started a weekly Ruby hack night, Los Angeles Ruby Brigade. All design, HTML and CSS by me.

Contact : Evan Phoenix

Razzle Dazzle

I started an online magazine. It uses roughly the This American Life format. Each issue has a theme with a collection of stories from a multiple people on that theme. All design, HTML and CSS by me.

Contact : ...Me?

While we talk about avoiding silos, I was the front end silo. I cleaned up non-semantic markup, inline CSS and <center> tags. I pondered whether to use a <dl> or a two column table, a line chart or a bar chart. I tore apart table based layouts and superfluous <divs>.

I designed, marked up and styled an internal dashboard that we used to watch high level important numbers. I conducted A/B test on different interface designs. Where I could I slid microformats into the codebase.

I helped launch and maintained the company weblog. I translated static Photoshop mockups into real live HTML / CSS and (depending on the case) Ruby on Rails ERB. I cut away at interface designs with Occam's Razor.

RubySpec Continuous Integration Dashboard

Ryan Davis and Evan Phoenix asked me to bang out a dashboard design plus the HTML / CSS to illustrate high level progress of the Rubinius (and later MRI and JRuby) builds on different platforms. Ryan and I iterated really quickly over a few permutations. The evolution is below in the order that it transpired.

Contact : Evan Phoenix

Seattle.rb

I've been going to Seattle Ruby Brigade meetings for a few years. I have started working with some of the other rubyists on 'marketing' kinds of things for various ruby projects.

Contact : Eric Hodel

Seattle.rb logo

The first thing I did for Seattle.rb was to cleanup and stylize the logo. The first thumbnail below is the old logo, all the others are my redesigns. There are multiple versions for various use cases. Some one color, some with a gradient. With word mark, without. Some are horizontal, some more square-ish.

Contact : Ryan Davis

Seattle.rb Website

The design goal was to highlight three things important to the group: the people involved, the regular meetings and the projects made by the people involved. Secondarily, my aim was to reduce the complexity of the data by using one column and one page. Less clicking about. The first thumbnail is the old website.

Contact : Ryan Davis

Heckle

I commissioned an illustration and worked as Art Director on this logo. The vectorization was also done by me.

Contact : Ryan Davis

Mechanzie

I cleaned an old illustration and repurposed it for this logo. I added the typography.

Contact : Aaron Patterson

Rubinius

I designed the main project logo. I designed and coded up the initial Rubinius homepage (black background). While at RailsConf 2008 in Portland I whipped up a new homepage (white background) to replace the older one. For the website version of the logo, I art directed a friend converting my 2D flat version into a shiny 3D version.

Contact : Evan Phoenix

ZineDistro

I did nearly all the work on this project, excluding content. I designed it, wrote all the of html and css and ruby/rails code. I used some new html5 markup on this site.

Contact : Eli Duke

ListYourList

Eli Duke and I rebuilt this together from the ground up using all the new the new tricks and techniques that we had picked up in the 3 years since its inception.

Contact : Eli Duke

White Raven is the company of Marvin Schlaak, my previous creative director at Arcadus. I've contracted with him on and off for several years. Work has included Flash development, interface design, PHP scripting and xhtml and css devlopment.

Examples of our work together include: Cobb County Energy, Hestia Custom Homes and Griffiti.

I worked between the designers and the programmers. We experimented with Flash as a replacement for the front-end for WisdomTool's application. I built prototypes of different pieces in the application. I was also a part of a small team who adventured on redesigning the front-end interface of their application top to bottom.

A few months later, the dot com bubble popped. 30 of us were laid off.

I was the across-the-board designer. I was responsible for the website design, collateral design and Flash rapid application development.

While I was there IIPI was making location based applications for mobile devices. I would make Flash based mockups of what the application could be down the road.

I did Flash interactive design on external and in-house projects including rebranding public relaunch and internal sales demo tool. Client branding design. I was a part of Plaid's rebranding and Mac of All Trades' rebranding.

Both of these have, of course, since overhauled their sites, but the brand is still based on the work we did. A couple years after I left, Arcadus merged with another company then shortly later went out of business. Thus, no website.