Hi, I’m Max Barvian, a digital product designer from Chicago, IL. I enjoy thoughtful code, simple design, and making products that combine both.

I spent the last 4 years of my career learning from and working alongside great people at WSOL. I had the opportunity to lead some projects while I was there, including a redesigned website for the city of Naperville, IL, and some responsive redesigns for university websites. Beyond that, I worked within the creative team, where we designed wireframes, developed prototypes, and thought long and hard about where to place search fields for clients ranging from local businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

I love making the most out of a project’s constraints and picking the best tools for the job. I work well alone but better when I’m on a team, preferably one that values open design critiques. More than anything, though, I enjoy working on projects that I find meaningful, and I think it’s a privilege to work in an industry where these aren’t hard to come by. My interests lie mostly in health and social issues, but if anything in this paragraph sounds like you or your company, I’d love to chat.

Tech-wise, I’m currently most interested in Polymer (and Web Components, by extension) and potentially getting it to work nicely with Redux for larger-scale applications. I like the flexibility and scale of Polymer as a platform; there’s no massive library to load besides a lightweight web component shim so it works seamlessly with almost any architecture. The build tools are still pretty young, though, and there are quite a few rough edges that will smooth out over the next few months as features become standardized and implemented by browser vendors. This site uses Polymer under the hood and page.js for routing, but otherwise it’s just a plain-ol’ Jekyll site hosted on Github pages with a few tricks here and there.

Beyond web design, I’m an avid meditator and an occasional cinephile (I still log to Letterboxd when I remember). I’ve only written a handful of articles so far, but I plan on writing more in the future, particularly about health and tech issues. Oh, and recently I’m extremely interested in DIY home automation stuff, mostly because Max Braun blew my mind (and the rest of Medium’s) with his bathroom mirror. The bar has been raised.

Elsewhere, I share micro-opinions on Twitter, works-in-progress on Dribbble, current rotations on Spotify, and work experience on LinkedIn. I try to host any code I can on Github, including this website. Thanks for reading. 🖐