Daniel Lopes

email danielvlopes@gmail.com | twitter @danielvlopes

I'm UI designer and developer. Building on 11 years of experience, my style is solving problems by keeping an eye on the whole.

Summary

I'm a senior web developer and designer with solid knowledge of UI/UX, using tools like HTML5, CSS3, JS, Coffeescript, prototyping, wireframing and visual design like Photoshop/Illustrator.

Apart from Design, I have 6 years of experience in Ruby and very comfortable on learning new programming languages.

I'm also a known teacher and public speaker in Ruby's brazilian community. I've been teaching topics like Rails, Ruby, JavaScript and design for the past 5 years for more than 1500 students.

My Beliefs

Start with the user experience and then move on to technology.
Iterate throughout the entire development cycle.
UI Designers should work closely to developers with a hands-on approach.
Visual design is fundamental but is only one part of user-experience.
Favor intuition over rules, practices and methodologies.

My career

2001
I started with a technical course in IT lasting 3 years. Shortly after completion, at age 16, I was hired to work on desktop apps used in movie theaters. I concluded my BS in Information Systems at age 21.
2004
In order to test new technologies, learn how to manage my own projects and deal with clients I became a freelancer.
2006
I became partner in a small design studio. At the same time, I started using Rails on my projects, which made me enjoy making web apps again.
2007
I was invited to teach Adobe Flex in the most popular online school in Brazil, e-Genial. A year later, I moved from Flex to Rails and have been teaching Ruby's related topics ever since. I continued with this partnership until 2012 and had the opportunity to train over 1,500 students, both in physical classrooms and live online classes.
2008
I launched a product for the financial market called Cifras. I both developed and maintained the software by myself for over a year. Seeing things from another perspective was an amazing experience. I was pleased with the implementation but I learned that building amazing requires many different skills which makes doing it alone really, really hard.
2010
In 2010 I was invited to be university teacher on a post-graduation course. It was an interesting experience but formal education in Brazil has some flaws and I found myself lacking passion. At the same time, I co-founded a consultancy company called Objetiva Software.
2012
In Objetiva I was involved with teams and projects of all kinds and sizes. From startups to entreprise customers, from desktop to mobile.

We consciously decided to maintain a small team. We were profitable from day one and managed to deliver and keep our customers happy.

Even with everything going well, I believe that we need to change when it's not required. Feeling that we reached a good level of what is possible with consultancy, me and my partner decided to put our company on hold right after a good acquisition proposal. We've done consultancy for long enough, and it's time to try something new.
NOW I’m taking a break, traveling a bit and looking for the next challenge at the same time.

Some of my most recent projects as designer

In that project I was the responsible for visual design, including psd mockups, html, css and UX as whole. It was an interesting experience be part of a Grails team and deal with integration of my ideas with production code.

In this one, my job was layout, branding and frontend development. I was also part of Rails team. The core idea was a place where people in Brazil could find good restaurants. The restaurants also had some control over the UI of their pages.

For this project I was responsible just for psd mockups and branding. This is not the style I like to follow, I usually prefer to work with real html/css inside the App to really test and integrate the design. But for this project, I think the final result was good enough.

For this project I was responsible for the whole layout, frontend and also part of the Rails team. It was an interesting project specially the theme gallery because there was a lot of constraints to deal.