Blake Walters

Another fun freelance project for the talented Mikey Neumann and crew. Designed and built a simple but extensible landing page and Wordpress theme with a few whiz bang YouTube API hooks (including a dynamically built scrolling background featuring video thumbnails automatically updated on a schedule).

Check it out at csso.tv

First dedicated front-end developer. Brought on to build and maintain HashiCorp's enterprise offering - Atlas. Atlas is a web application built upon Rails and Ember.js unifying HashiCorp's suite of open source tools including Terraform for managing infrastructure, Consul for service discovery, configuration, and health, and many more.

Contributions include planning, development, and some design of front-end application features.

Sign up for a demo at hashicorp.com.

When Mikey Neuman - Borderlands writer, creative dude at Gearbox Software, and all around great internet guy - needed a new site for his YouTube series Movies with Mikey, I was fortunate enough to be selected to help out.

What came out was a single page Wordpress site, designed and built to require as little human interaction as possible to maintain. New video panels are automatically pulled in upon upload, non-video panels are managed right in the Wordpress admin, and the layout is both responsive (working on the tiniest of phones up to the highest of resolution monitors) and constantly fresh with the latest video always featured up top and a random assortment of content down below.

See the site at movieswithmikey.com.

Mobile Admin is a bespoke mobile experience for Big Cartel's platform interface. With near feature parity with the existing admin experience, the Big Cartel Mobile admin allows users to manage products, orders, settings, and more right from their phones and tablets.

This project features a mobile-specific design implementation and optimization, a hand built JavaScript application framework, and an entirely CSS driven design utilizing icon fonts and mathematically derived coloring.

For the 2013 holiday season, Big Cartel put together a hand curated guide outlining gifts for all the special people in your life. This site features a web-ready video background, in page scrolling navigation, a fully responsive implementation, and fun ornament animations as well.

Looking to bring more flexibilty for it's users and their customers, Big Cartel sought out to bring stripe integration and a seemless checkout system to their platform. Checkout is a client-side application built on Backbone.js and features a fully customizable theming system, a responsive design that's theme agnostic, utilizes push state and a custom written router to handle the complex business logic for maintaining cross session states.

Showing our take on building a store from scratch, Big Cartel launched it's a shop on its own platform in mid 2013. Built on the Big Cartel theme platform, and utilizing the then recently released Dugway, the Big Cartel Shop is a highly visual, fully custom shopping experience. Shop features large, scalable, high quality photos, svg animations, a custom built JS carting and checkout integration, and a fully responsive design.

Took the existing Big Cartel theme Sidecar and drastically updated, fully rewriting the underlying codebase and implemeting a new fully responsive design.

Hands down my largest ExpressionEngine site to date - Duke Admissions is a complete re-imagining of what it means to connect with prospective students and convey what life at Duke is truly like. Each and every page is handcrafted, and all content fully customizable, thanks to ExpressionEngine's unparalleled power and flexibility. To help Duke create and maintain such a large volume of copy and photos, the EE control panel has been customized on per page basis and allows Duke's editors to update the site with ease. For my part, I served as lead front-end and integration developer - leading a small team through build-out and integrating and customizing the ExpressionEngine installation.

As a budding gaming startup, Rumble Games needed a high quality site to represent their work. Built on ExpressionEngine and utilizing custom written add-ons to tap into their external user authentication and management suite, the Rumble Games site is rock solid and highly customizable end-to-end. Including blog posts, news, press releases, careers, team profiles, and even dynamically generated top-level sections for games - Rumble is empowered to keep their content fresh and on target. For this project I served as the integration engineer, taking highly polished designs and build-out work and bringing them to life with ExpressionEngine and custom written addons for user authenticaion.

Having built Lafayette's main site, Viget was tapped to add a dedicated mobile experience to their .edu specifically targeting students on campus. For my part, I served as front and backend engineer - building out the front-end of the site and creating custom WordPress themes and plugins to augment Lafayette's existing platform. Ultimately, the work was rolled out to dozens of subsites across all of Lafayette's departments and utilizes custom written PHP to tap into their online directory and calendaring.

Cisco was looking for a way to bring a little more fun to teleconferencing. What resulted was a single page micro-site with the ridiculousness of a carnival. With a heavy dose of CSS3 animation and tons of interactivity, Welcome to Your Meeting is a conferencing utility unlike any other. For this project, I served as the front-end developer and was responsible for the daunting task of implementing all design and interaction on the site.

Kettler property management has been a long-standing client of Viget's. Wanting to extend their reach and provide more utility for their customers, we were tapped to build a mobile experience catering to on-the-go users. Leveraging the existing ExpressionEngine platform, Kettler's new mobile site feature property search, listings, photo galleries, maps and more all in a pint-sized package. For this project, I served as front and backend developer, building out the interface as well as integrating on ExpressionEngine including custom development for integrating with Kettler's third party pricing and availability system.

Served as lead front-end developer for the Society for Human Resource Managment's WeKnowNext.com - a content and blogging platform built on ExpressionEngine.

Served as front-end developer and performed ExpressionEngine integration for the home of Philippe Cousteau's organization EarthEcho's web presence.

Epic Games needed a web presence for their Unreal Engine that matched it's unparalleled technology and design. Viget delivered and with the help of nGen Works had a fully customized ExpressionEngine install to match.

My role in the Epic Games project was as lead front-end developer - building-out the site layout, structure and templates and added interactive features and touches through JavaScript and CSS3.

Built for the Roosevelt Institute, Think2040 is a microsite dedicated to gathering information about our nations values and educating users on changes going on in today's society.

Highlights of this project include extensive custom JavaScript work, linking non-video assets to changes in a Vimeo video player utilizing Vimeo's JS API, CSS3 work including 3d transforms and a custom parallax scrolling background. My responsibilities were full build-out of all HTML, CSS and JavaScript on the site.

Dots For Tots harnesses the power of Ms. Pac-man, and our irrational love for her, for good.

We’re raising funds for Child’s Play Charity by playing Ms. Pac-man for as long as your donations keep us going. We’re just a handful of web nerds at Viget Labs. Long ago, our awesome client Squidoo gifted us with our own Ms. Pac-man machine. Little did they know the Pac-man fever they would one day incite in our office.

On March 25th, we’ll turn our productivity-sucking addiction into a worthy cause, with the help of your donations. You’ll support a great cause and get to see on live, streaming video full-grown, 21st century adults obsess over a 30 year-old arcade game.

When Lockheed Martin needed a engaging new showcase for their best and brightest research and development projects, they came to Viget. Fitting in to their existing brand identity and highlighting their complex and outrageous work, we had the opportunity to build a fully standards-based web gallery with custom tailored animations and interactions.

My responsibilities on this project included all HTML, CSS and JavaScript work as well as motion design and some user interaction design.

Intro site implementation done utilizing HTML5, CSS3 and light touches of JavaScript for interactions.

Viget Labs happens to be the proud owners of an original, working 1981 Ms. Pac-Man cocktail table. Collecting dust, unused for years, the front-end development team decided to give her new life in our little corner of the office. Being a fully working, 30 year-old arcade machine, we wanted to make sure we took as best care of her as possible which unfortunately meant powering her off when not in use wiping any high scores set each time.

A simple web app proved to be just what we needed. Built on top of the Django framework for Python, Viget Ms. Pac-Man is a fully featured score aggregation system. Scores are submitted by registered players via Twitter (a typical tweet looking like "@vigetmspacman 22560") and logged by the app at a preset interval. Scores are used to display a universal Top 10 list, show global statistics and graphs (such as average score, games played per day and total points earned) as well a per user statistics and even achievements.

This fun side-project was wholly my own. Every aspect including back-end development, visual design, front-end implementation, Twitter integration and even a public API was hand-crafted by yours truly.

Served as lead front-end developer for the web application Bypasslane.com. Billed as a way to revolutionize the way sports fans and event goers order refreshments in stadiums, the Bypass project spanned multiple digital mediums including the desktop web, a mobile web app and a bespoke, in browser, touch-based point-of-sale system.

My contribution included front-end development for all three platforms.

Served as lead interface architect and developer for the second phase of Coke Zero's Fannovation campaign — fannovation.posterous.com. Working with the Posterous team to build a custom front-end for their blogging platform, the Fannovation site allowed anyone to blog their ideas for great Coke Zero March Madness tie-in campaigns for a chance to win $10,000 and a trip to the 2011 Final Four.

My contribution included all front-end development, visual design implementation and Posterous system integration.

Served as lead interface architect and developer for Crispin Porter’s radical redesign of their homepage — CPBGroup.com. This single page social media aggregator features a fully accessible and SEO friendly Ajax interface with highly complex real-time updating and JavaScript animation.

My contribution included overseeing all front-end development, visual design implementation and creation of a custom event-driven JavaScript framework to manage all client-side interaction.

Served as lead interface architect and developer for American Express’ OPEN Forum — a completely custom-built social network for small businesses. The OPEN Forum includes over 50 unique page templates, full American Express account integration, custom member profiles, a content management system for videos, articles and events and a stunning array of Ajax and DHTML Interactions.

Served as lead interface architect and developer for Burger King’s redesign of their online corporate identity at BK.com.

My contribution included overseeing all front-end development, creating a custom, modular CSS framework which aides in flexible layout generation for all corporate pages, building a stand-alone, easily modified version of the site to be used for vendor implementations and implementing numerous JavaScript pieces including a multi-source overlay video player.

Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld marked Microsoft Windows’ surprising return to the global advertising stage. With it, Windows.com was redesigned and relaunched with the dynamic duo front and center.

My contribution (to one of my highest profile launches ever) included visual design implementation, progressive enhancement through a number of video formats (including Flash, Silverlight and Windows Media Player) and making the first version of the Windows home page to ever be XHTML valid.

To prove that PC’s aren’t just nerdy guys in bad suits that all look like John Hodgman, Microsoft launched Windows’ “I’m a PC” campaign. Accepting video and photo submissions of "PC’s" around the world, we built an endless wall of the community for all the world to see. To target the largest amount of visitors possible, one version of the wall was created fully in JavaScript utilizing custom-built velocity and distance-based animation (as opposed to traditional tween animation) and mouse position detection that achieved stunning results and huge amounts traffic.

Was responsible for the front-end implementation on a variety of projects throughout the VW.com ecosystem including a complete rework of all primary consumer contact forms on the site (used for scheduling test drives, getting quotes and contacting dealters), integration of 360° car viewers, HTML email blasts and a number of campaign specific microsites.

Was responsible for the front-end implementation of Domino’s Pizza’s award winning redesign of their consumer website and online ordering system. Development included brand-new home, corporate and menu pages as well as a full re-skin of the ordering system. Subsequent phases included rollouts of campaign specific homepages and integration inline visual pizza builder to enhance the ordering process.