Technical leader, front-end developer, animator and production artist with over 20 years of experience creating digital content as well as managing teams of developers and designers. Proven success planning and executing projects with limited oversight for clients like Samsung, Mercedes, Disney, Nike and Lego. Approachable manager with experience estimating, solving technical problems, reaching consensus, resolving conflicts and hiring. Over 5 years of experience working with remote teams across multiple time zones. Comfortable writing minimal vanilla JavaScript as well as using the latest front-end frameworks and libraries. Able to leverage design background to bridge the gap between creative and tech.
Matt Blackstone
Creative Technologist
linkedin.com/in/mattblackstone
Summary
Work
RED:
Power Of RED
A web experience showcasing the industry leading technology of RED Digital Cinema. Interactive animations and video help explain highly technical information to a wide audience and provide a rich user experience for desktop and mobile. Built mostly vanilla JS and GSAP. View project
Strava:
Year In Sport
An interactive data visualization experience for athletes who use Strava to track their workouts. Strava's annual Year In Sport is a chance for athletes to review their fitness highlights, progress, summary and share stats with friends. Designed in Figma, prototyped in vanilla JS and built using React. View project
R/GA:
Spreadsheet Driven Static Site
Automated workflows using custom scripted Google Sheets are extremely effective, but can be overwhelming. A well designed front-end view gives much more control over how the data is displayed while still using the Google Sheets as the data source. The tech stack includes Google APIs, AWS Lambda, React and Next.js View project
Mercedes-Benz:
Build Your Own
Visitors to MBUSA are retargeted in display channels with dynamic ad content featuring a replica of the vehicle that they configured (class, model, paint, wheels etc). Using a custom developed solution, new vehicle configurations are pulled dynamically from the MBUSA media server at impression time, and cached at the dynamic ad server for future requests. View project
Disney Parks & Resorts:
Shopping Cart Abandoners
Data from abandoned shopping carts on Disney owned properties helps target users with ads designed to facilitate planning a Disney vacation. Users see ads featuring their favorite Disney characters with helpful suggestions relevant to the resorts from their carts. The content changes over time with special offers and reminders to book soon. Design systems, automation and extremely flexible HTML templates enabled thousands of variations. View project
Mailchimp:
Programmatic Automation
A programmatic ad campaign built without the use of a dynamic ad server such as Sizmek or Flashtalking. A local Node.js workflow paired with scripted spreadsheets to automate the creation of the hundreds of ad versions required circumvented the need for a dynamic ad server. As a result, the media team retained full ownership of the performance metrics and the ads were served at a much lower cost. View project
Samsung:
Display Advertising
Pushing the limits of display advertising using a variety of animation techniques (GSAP, CSS 3D, Canvas, Lottie, Spritesheets etc) to achieve video quality in a package of around 200k. View examples
Experience
RED Digital Cinema
Senior Frontend Developer (2022 – present)
Build interactive marketing experiences that showcase the industry leading digital video capabilities of RED cameras. Maintain and improve RED's large ecommerce website. Refactor legacy code to improve performance and usability by leveraging front-end frameworks like Alpine and Svelte.
Spectrum
Senior Frontend Developer (2021 – 2022)
Build Vue.js + Vuex front-end for data-driven WebGL-based 3D product customization. Each unique front-end UI for clients like Specialized, Levi's, Gerber and Chewy ties the 3D product and backend data together to give the user a truly immersive experience to visualize their customized product from any angle before it's sent to the factory for production.
R/GA
Technology Director (2009 – 2020)
Lead front-end development projects for clients such as Nike, Verizon, and Walmart. Create templates and documentation for developers in our Portland, New York and Buenos Aires offices. Build framework agnostic prototypes for client approval. Oversee developers and liaise with producers and creative teams. Consult with creative teams about technical possibilities during concept phase.
Cheil
Design Director (2003 – 2008)
Managed and created promotional campaigns for Samsung ranging from landing pages to larger websites. Produced rich-media advertising to drive traffic to these destinations. Oversaw video and photo shoots with vendors. Created some of the first promotional content for Facebook and YouTube.
*More experience available upon request.
Code
- JavaScript
- ES6+
- HTML5
- CSS/SCSS
- JSON
- Svelte
- Vue
- React
- Next.js
- Alpine
- Bash
- SQL
Tools
- Git
- Node
- npm
- Babel
- Webpack
- Rollup
- Greensock
- AWS
- AWS Lambda
- Azure
- Contentful
- Jira
Software
- Visual Studio Code
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe XD
- Adobe After Effects
- Adobe Animate
- Figma
Education
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA
Bachelor of Science
1992 – 1996
Areas of study: graphic design, 3D animation, printmaking, color theory, painting, drawing, sculpture, math and science.