Ciprian Cimpan

Part of The Omidyar Group, Luminate is a global philanthropic organisation with the goal of empowering people and institutions to work together to build just and fair societies.

They wanted to establish a bold online presence and at the same time have an easy way to manage grants, users, media and other content.

I achieved this by developing a content management system with a back-end focused on simplicity and tailored to their exact needs. With built-in features like a blog, media library, seo edits & elastic search content indexing, the whole app is engineered to deliver content fast and with minimum editorial effort.

Zaang is a London based UX & UI agency specialising in product design. Their core philosophy is to make people's lives easier by designing effective software.

Historically they used WordPress to build websites and wanted to migrate away from it. As even small edits often required developer involvement, a custom CMS was needed to better suit their work style. I decided to create a more intuitive and flexible CMS system which could be easily reused for other clients, thus saving development costs.

The agency plans to expand it with a constellation of online tools & services meant to share industry knowledge and help designers learn more about UI/UX concepts.

One of Zaang's key service is to compile Expert UX reports. In this process, a large share of time is lost formatting the raport - collating screenshots and presenting content nicely. Most comprehensive reports have over 100 pages and required expensive subscription-based software (Adobe InDesign) to layout properly and export.

My task was to create a tool that can be used by Zaang and other UX companies to compile reports in a much faster, cheaper and efficient manner.

Using off-the-shelf PDF generation libraries was slow and put high pressure on the server for large documents, so we had to pivot away from traditional methods and use modern technologies such as Puppeteer and Google Chrome running in headless mode.

The team behind Songster wanted to create a social network for songwriters, where people could meet like-minded creators, chat and collaborate on writing lyrics for new songs.

I was tasked to develop a proof of concept for the web app, built on Laravel and which included the core functionality needed.

Although it never came to be developed to its full potential, Songster was a fun project who gathered some serious fans before being discontinued.