Hello, hello 👋 I’m excited to be featured on Codrops. I’ve been pulling inspiration from this website since I began my career as a web developer years ago. As I’m writing this, I’m on my second coffee, which means at this very moment I’m extra passionate about everything. Let’s get started.
My name’s Nathan and I’m a creative frontend based out of Toronto, Canada. I became self-taught in web development after university and found myself hating it for the first two years because the learning curve was too hard for my small brain. Coding was hard because it contained frustrating new concepts like open-brackets and camel casing and strings, which at face-value didn’t visually stimulate my brain the same way my YouTube feed would. For those who don’t know what a string is, it’s text between quotes. But at the time, I felt as though I had been tasked with solving an unworldly riddle.
“It can’t be as simple as text between quotes”, I would say. “Nothing in life is as simple as text between quotes. There must be more to it”.
As it turned out, there wasn’t more to it. It really is just text between quotes, and I was overcomplicating everything because code is called “code” (we should rename this). Things finally clicked, and I fell in love with my job. Now, a little more than 10 years into this career, things like an optimized GSAP animation rocks my socks. When I see a codebase structured in an intentional way, I bite my lip. And piecing it all together with an easily-updateable headless CMS makes my toes curl.
I love my job for a lot of reasons. It’s “practical” and I get to feed the artistic side of me from time to time. It also keeps me busy and pushes away existential questions about life and purpose that no one enjoys answering. I like to think I am making the world a better place with my interesting websites, but the stark reality is that my websites don’t contribute to human flourishing as much as I would like them to.
When someone is having a stroke on an airplane, flight attendants don’t ask passengers if there’s a creative web developer around to assist with the situation, and this doesn’t offend me. The fact is, doctors win Nobel Prizes and I’m more interested in winning Sites of the Day anyways. Doctors own spacious backyards with large gardens, I own a Juliet balcony/prison fence barring my condo from outside existence. There are trade-offs to everything in life. And there is certainly an added layer of purpose and meaning that comes from working for yourself that makes me love this job even more.
When you work for yourself, your name is on the line. You’re throwing yourself into the world of saturated web development competition, and you get to decide what kind of name you want to make for yourself – how do you want to stand out? While my brain loves the task-oriented nature of web development, delivering a polished project to a satisfied client is extremely rewarding. This is at least half of why I love my career: I get to build something that I value and someone else values. This is a strong motivator and reminder during tough days when the code I’m writing isn’t working as intended and I want to light my head on fire. I pour a lot of time into my work and when clients appreciate that, it makes all of the difficult moments feel like it was worth it.
My bread-and-butter tech stack is Next.js & Sanity (with GSAP for animations), but I’ve worked with some other stacks and they’re pretty cool too I guess. In recent years, AI has made my job even more enjoyable by taking on the mundane tasks about the job I care for the least.
And, after all that chatter, here are some fun projects I’ve had the pleasure of working on:
Lusano
Design Partner: CUSP
Role: Lead Dev (Solo)
Awards: Awwwards Site of the Day, Developer Award
Website: https://www.lusano.com/
Lusano is a high-end furniture company based out of LA. They blend classic craftsmanship with a modern point of view – drawing from Italian heritage and Scandinavian minimalism. We built them a lookbook-style ecommerce site designed for exploration. It’s tailored to how interior designers and galleries browse: discovering pieces and getting inspired.
The client was open to all and any creative suggestions and of course, my design partners on this (CUSP) were a pleasure (as per usual) to work with. If you genuinely enjoy the process and your client is open to different creative approaches you recommend, I can promise you that some of your best work will come out of that project.
Admittedly, I did pull out my recently-transplanted hair while building some of the more complex features of this website (page transitions and product gallery, to name a couple). But what I now lack in hair follicles, the client gained in what is an original ecommerce experience.
The animations were subtle, but impactful. The imagery we had access to was polished. The launch was smooth as butter. Everyone was extremely happy with the final result.
Tech Stack:
Metalab
Design Partner: Metalab
Role: Lead Dev
Awards: Awwwards Site of the Day, Developer Award, Awwwards Portfolio Honors
Website: https://www.metalab.com/
Metalab is a Canadian-born agency who builds products for impressive companies like Suno, Uber, Midjourney, Slack, Headspace and Calvin Klein (just to name a few). For this project, we let their work do most of the talking, because it really does speak for itself. From leadership to design, their staff is filled with such impressive talent. I felt extremely blessed to be selected by Metalab to help bring their new website to life.
A major highlight of the redesign was the concept exploration. Metalab developed three directions: Frames, Constellations, and Editorial layer. In the end, they decided on the Frames direction. Frames was a flexible system that uses portals and windows to open up different “universes” of Metalab, its clients, and individual projects. We iterated on it heavily to keep it usable: portals are triggered through interaction (scroll/hover/movement) so the experience feels exploratory without making users feel lost.
This was such a fun website to work on. Ultimately, we were all thrilled with the outcome, and the launch was extremely smooth (as per usual). I can’t say enough good things about the talent within Metalab.
Tech Stack:
I met some really cool, talented people on this project. When you work with a team for months on end, you get to know each member well. It feels bittersweet shipping the final product while saying goodbye (for now).
Bonus: Some people thought this site was so neat, they even re-created the hover animations for the homepage and it was featured on Codrops <3.
The Genius Club
Design Partner: CUSP
Role: Lead Dev (Solo)
Awards: Awwwards Site of the Day, Developer Award
Website: https://wearegeniusclub.com/
The Genius Club is a collective of creatives: producers, directors, artists, brand experts, creative designers and project leaders. They work with huge names like Megan Thee Stallion, Billy Eilish, Gunna and Future, to name a few. The website we built for them is a portfolio site containing some of their highlighted work.
This was a smaller site to work on, but a lot like the Lusano website, the client was exceptionally easy-going and provided a lot of cool assets for us to use. The color scheme is unserious but when you click around and play with page transitions, you’ll notice there was a lot of work put into the subtler elements.
If you tell me the website you want me to build has a ticker, I’m all in. A ticker for an upscale web experience is ironic, yet compelling. Art.
Tech Stack:
Monolith
Design Partner: CUSP
Role: Lead Dev (Solo)
Awards: Awwwards Site of the Day, Developer Award, E-Comm Site of the Year Nomination
Website: https://monolith.nyc/
All I am good for is high-end furniture website experiences, apparently.
Monolith is a design studio and gallery featuring a collection of monolithic furniture and objects. Each minimalist piece uses lines and heavy proportions to reveal the natural beauty and sophistication of each material. We centered the design around a Swiss-inspired foundation with subtle brutalist influence, aiming for minimalism that still feels geometric and utilitarian (nothing without purpose).
Tech Stack:
A couple interesting things about this build that were fun to work on:
- The preloader: I enjoyed building out this seamless transition into the homepage (which is infinite scroll – thanks, Lenis)
- The product grid: I thought the view-toggle was interesting – the animation was essentially transitioning boxes of different sizes into each-other, depending on the view the user selected
- Infinite-Scroll Carousel: This is at the bottom of every product page, and the reason why it stood out to me as a little more interesting than a traditional infinite carousel is that it highlights one item in the center and has custom lerping functionality. A lot of (frustrating) calculations go on behind the scenes to determine the size/transform properties of each item
Let’s talk more about me now
I love my career. Since going freelance, I’ve never looked back. If anyone is on the fence about becoming a freelancer, just know that most freelancers suck and the ones who are good at their jobs are the ones who genuinely enjoy the process. The freelancers who enjoy it actually want a good relationship with their clients and partners and respond at unfortunate times to Slack messages. Clients and partners appreciate this. If you love what you do for a living, you’re already more desirable to work with than 80% of the competition.
What do I do besides work? I’m currently figuring that out. My work/life balance is very much not-balanced. I like working out and cooking healthy meals, but that’s unoriginal and boring. I really love how AI has made my work easier in some regards, but if it ever fully displaced me, I’d have a manic breakdown and gain a lot of weight in a short period of time. Years later, someone might see me walking down the street and say, “Hey, aren’t you that website guy?” and I’d pause. I’d turn my head to them and say “I used to be. But now, I’m not sure who I am”, as I pull bits and pieces of old bread out of my coat pocket to snack on.
Some other tidbits about me:
- I think social media is cancer and I only have LinkedIn for work
- I want to live in a van
- I have begun using a phone that has a keyboard
- I once went viral for driving 9 hours to buy McDonald’s pizza from the last place that sold it
- I’m 90% sure I have nerve damage in my right toe
Contact me (I might just have availability)!
I’m a developer who loves meeting new people (I understand how paradoxical this sentence is). Want to team up, hand off a build for someone to take end-to-end, or just say hey? Send an email to nathan@dallaire.io or message me on LinkedIn!
