James Lin
fusiongt@pacbell.net
fusiongt@pacbell.net
James Lin
james.lin.andrew@gmail.com
james.lin.andrew@gmail.com
Hi and welcome to my portfolio!
Please take a look at the projects I created below. Every link you go to will feature both designs and front-end development created by me unless otherwise noted.
Mosser Living is a property company that focuses on mix-use apartments and retail properties and has a large presence in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles.
Before I joined, Mosser's web presence was very lacking as a number of outside agencies were in charge of it and did the bare minimum. I was promptly put in charge of redesigning the apartment website as well as the hotel website. Within a few months, fully functioning websites replaced the old archaic sites that were there before. UX improvements took place as well allowing all of Mosser's 90+ properties to be shown in one convenient location whereas previously they were scattered on 90+ websites. This has led to many more web leads and overall increased business.
RentSFNow is one of San Francisco's premiere apartment renting companies. I joined for a small project to work with their in-house CMS and ended up staying longer to revamp their existing website.
Within a year of working there, I worked with the marketing team to completely redesign the RentSFNow site. I also helped create their site into a robust real estate listing site that has hundreds of active listings and that helps generate over 40 leads a day. Prior to this, the website had little value and confused users as you couldn't view apartments! Some of the on-going tasks have been maintaining new content, SEO to produce as much organic traffic as possible, and tracking paid leads through cookies that interact with our email forms.
In 2018, the company wanted to rebrand and consolidate their 3 products into just one. They hired an outside agency only to do the development, only to find many outside agencies just do the bare minimum and don't produce a product worth calling your own. I stepped in and recoded the entire project and worked with a back-end developer to get Salesforce integrated into the new Wordpress site.
In 2019, I successfully redesigned, developed, and launched 3 of their main websites. RentSFNow apartment listing functionality improved as well, really helping with bringing in new residents to the buildings. And in 2022, redesigned and launched their corporate website which had not had an overhaul for over a decade.
Unicorn Consulting is a construction, engineering, and interior design firm. They were a very successful company without having an online presence so I helped them design and develop a Wordpress site to show off their portfolio of projects.
Located in San Francisco, Redmint offers traditional Chinese medicine and holistic rituals such as acupuncture, massage, and skincare. The website went through various iterations and is on Shopify where it receives many online purchases as well as local purchases from their retail store. Redmint also handles scheduling, classes, and events through MindBody which is integrated into the website.
Located in Sacramento with offices there and in Oakland, Thomas Law Group focuses on enviornmental law. The website showcases TLG's extensive work with many high profile projects, their work with the community, various cases, and hundreds of CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) blog entries. It was a joy to work on because of all of the unique photographs I was able to use from their photographer. While most lawfirm websites are fairly straightforward, TLG's was much more complicated as I needed to account for the entire team adding CEQA blog entries, as well as being able to add entries to the cases, projects, and each individuals' own biography.
Urban Capital of San Francisco is a Bay Area commercial investment sales and mortgage brokerage firm. They are a tight knit team getting many transactions done through the Bay Area as well as throughout Colorado. I worked closely with them to give their website a modern design that still looks professional without being too flashy. I enabled their team to make easy edits throughout the website such as adding new team members and new transactions that they've completed.
Bumblee Ceramics is a small business shop that creates beautiful custom ceramics for families (such as a child's handprint, a dog paw print). The website was created on Wordpress and Woocommerce as the e-commerce platform. It was fun working to create a solution for all the customization options that are available on each product. The website is receiving many custom orders a month now and I look forward to helping it grow.
Excel in Basketball is a basketball training program for children located in the East Bay of the Bay Area. The company spans back to the late 1980's and has been teaching thousands of kids the beauty of the sport of basketball. The previous website had a very outdated design that was not mobile friendly and very difficult to update so I recreated it with a modern design on Wordpress. This enabled us to maintain thousands of images, along with data entries of the basketball camp dating back to the start of the company.
My good friend started a podcast about star actors and celebrities lives whom were cut short. It's a very interesting topic and while the podcast is still young, I think the high quality of work really shows. I helped her make the website on Wordpress and my friend maintains it.
After the success of the Market Street Prototyping Festival website (mentioned below), the SF Planning Department brought me back the next year to work on an even larger more unique website. It was similar to the MSPF site in that it focused on art projects that took place in San Francisco, but rather than focus on just a few weeks a year, it would instead be a site that featured art projects that took place all year long.
I worked closely with the graphic designer in their company to bring this project to fruition. The designs were some of the most unique I've seen, in some cases more suitable for print rather than web. As the front-end developer, this was a challenge to simultaneously make the design come to life, but also make it as user friendly as possible (all while being fully responsive for all platforms). In addition to this, the majority of the content was going to be created by their marketing team, and so every step of the way I had to ensure the website was easily updateable. Their team was happy with the results and are using the website to showcase many new art projects taking place in San Francisco.
The Market Street Prototyping Festival is a yearly event in San Francisco that is very unique and shows off a number of street exhibits. I received this project from The Creative Group and it consisted of building out an entire functional and easily updated Wordpress site through (of all things) Adobe InDesign files. Definitely a first for me as most mock ups are in Photoshop format. This site made use of numerous plugins that I never worked with before and so each one presented a challenge as I needed to really customize them to cater to the vision. I made use of the latest Foundation CSS framework (and a blank Wordpress theme), numerous plugins (Master Slider, myEventON, Flickr Gallery, Like Buttons), and Advanced Custom Fields to make the admin side easy to work with depending on what Template the editor selected. It was one of the most advanced Wordpress sites I built out and I'm happy to make it come to life from just some InDesign files and PDFs. I passed along the site back to the company and the graphic designer there easily edited the site as they received new content and let me know how easy it was to work with.
Was brought on board by the head of their marketing team to help maintain their website. Built on Wordpress, the website is a bit of a mess and difficult to maintain because of the previous developer. Talks of a redesign are still on-going and I look forward to helping with it to rid the world of impossible to update websites!
GroupTing was an ambitious project whose goal was to transform the way we setup events. We felt we could improve Evite by creating features that users didn't think they needed since they never were offered them. I started out simply to fix some of their html/css code, and right away saw they needed much more help than that. There was no designer in the group, and as talented as the developers were, without a front-end UI, the product would cease to become a product. I brought my design skills to help mold and create their vision.
Unfortunately life got in the way of this project; being a small company (essentially 3 people) we had 2 of the developers start their families and had children. The fully functioning website is now down, so I only have screenshots of the designs I worked on. All of the designs shown I also coded but cannot show here (we used AngularJS and I chose Foundation CSS as my CSS framework).
I joined Loto Labs as the VP of Technology and worked as a jack of all trades including everything from the logo, website, copy, print, ads, to the fundraising campaign. The goal for Loto Labs was to create the world's first induction vaporizer. We used Indiegogo as our crowdfunding platform and I helped propel it with all marketing copy and a professional design that helped get the public excited for our product.
We successfully raised over $225,000, over 300% more than our asking of $70,000, along with more from private funding. With my goal of a successful crowdfunding campaign complete, my heart wasn't into it as vaporizers and that industry isn't something I'm passionate about, so I stepped away with the company in great shape.
Delta Dental needed some help with a splash page for a portal they were releasing. What made this project unique to me was I had to revisit my old roots as a web designer and make everything work reasonably well for IE8. The page looks simple but it had to be responsive for every browser/mobile, and feature an accordion menu or drop down menu depending on the size of it. On top of all that, no Javascript should be used, so it was fun to find a CSS-only accordion solution that worked if people clicked back on their browser. This project also made me appreciate how good modern browsers are and suffice to say I could do without ever needing to find IE8 hacks again!
Working with The Creative Group, I worked with this non-profit organization, Beyond 12, to build their site from Photoshop files to a full functional Wordpress site that their team could update and manage. The scope of the project sounded simple at first: get mockups and put them into Wordpress. To my surprise, they did not have Wordpress or a server that could handle Wordpress! The previous company doing their website seemingly went out of their way to delay the project by making a static website, which really shocked me how some designers can take zero pride in their work.
The project suddenly became larger but I was up for the task. I worked with them in finding a new reliable host that specialized in Wordpress, and from there worked some magic on their small budget to get a full website up. Thankfully there was a lot more design work than just front-end development as a lot of the mockups they wanted my take on it.
One of my friends started professionally casting a popular video game, Nintendo's Smash Bros Melee. I've been a fan of gaming streams (like those found on Twitch.tv) so I helped SD Melee TV by producing graphics for it and I will be in charge of creating the website for it soon. Right now the events SD Melee TV holds are small but they are quickly gaining traction and they've begun casting larger tournaments with hundreds of participants and thousands of viewers!
My friends Stanley and Sarah asked me to do their wedding website which I happily accepted. They didn't have many ideas for the site so I threw a few designs together for them only for them to reject them all (life of a designer I suppose!) I sat with them at their apartment and they helped me design the site over my shoulder.
I did front end development contract work for Threefoldphotos to help them launch their product. Their product, Smile by Webshots, is a sophisticated photo service that combines users' photos from various sources (offline, Facebook, Instagram, etc) all into one easy to view/manage/share place.
Their environment consisted of Rails, and I would primarily work in HTML5/CSS as well as the stricter HAML/SASS equivalent. They made use of Github revision control system that also incorporates issues/tickets into one service. From there I would work with marketing and engineers to resolve bugs ranging from cross browser issues of their application, to getting the pages pixel perfect on their corporate site.
All of the example links are working HTML pages. They were intended to be viewed fullscreen and will look best if opened in a new tab.
