Hello.
I'm Óscar Otero
—digital designer

Superpowers:

Listen to people.
Divide a complex problem into several smaller and simpler ones.
Communicate with developers and help them to build the best possible interface.
Combine fonts and colors.
I can code my designs.

Successes:

I had my own design company with 4 partners for 8 years.
I've been president of the Design Association of Galicia.
I won a Mestre Mateo (Galician Oscar's), and an award at the MIPTV of Cannes without making films but designing.
I have ~~one~~, two GitHub repositories with more than 1000 stars.
I went to a workshop in Istanbul to teach about open video in English, and be able to be understood by the students.
I've been to a conference with Javier Cañada, Álvaro Valiño, Raquel Pelta, Pepe Barro and many other great designers, speaking about web and interactivity.
I've been part of a working group in the PHP-FIG, to work on a new PHP standard for Http Middlewares.
I was a member of a jury to evaluate works submitted by Spanish national design awards.

Failures:

I created a CSS processor but it wasn't popular.
I started a company with other partners but unfortunately, we weren't able to do what we wanted.
I cannot speak excellent English (yet).
After many attempts, I'm not able to make homemade dough bread.
I didn't make a beautiful personal website. But you can see some of my recent works in my portfolio.

Things I made:

Conxeito

Newsletter (in the Galician language) about digital design, published during the Covid confinement. You can access all numbers here:

#001 — Welcome — March 20, 2020
#002 — Web apps today — March 27, 2020
#003 — Design principles — April 3, 2020
#004 — About cursors and pointers — April 10, 2020
#005 — About design and code — 17 de abril, 2020
#006 — About subscriptions — April 24, 2020
#007 — Specialization and fragmentation — May 1, 2020
#008 — Tokens — May 8, 2020
#009 — Web books — May 15, 2020
#010 — Methods and tools — May 22, 2020
#011 — About colors — May 29, 2020
#012 — Job to be done — June 5, 2020
#013 — About tools — June 12, 2020
#014 — About Hey — June 19, 2020
#015 — Digital and sustainable — July 3, 2020
#016 — Public design — July 31, 2020
#017 — Internal logotypes — September 11, 2020
#018 — Transformative design — October 18, 2020
#019 — Static sites — November 15, 2020
#020 — Design for the speech — January 17, 2020

HA! redesign

During the redesign and development of the new web for HA!, I've documented the whole process in a collection of posts written in real-time (Galician language):

Part 1 — O reto — December 18, 2017
Part 2 — Tipografía — January 23, 2018
Part 3 — Layout — March 6, 2018
Part 4 — A cor — March 26, 2018
Part 5 — Artigos — April 23, 2018
Part 6 — Artistas e navegación — May 28, 2018
Part 7 — Rompendo algunhas regras — July 27, 2018

This project won several awards:

Ola

At marketgoo I have designed the Ola design system, and have collaborated in the implementation with this collection of React components, for emails with a collection of MJML components and many other internal works that I cannot share currently. This project started in 2019 and was presented in this post on the marketgoo blog.

Lume

In late 2020, I started the Lume project, a static site generator built on top of Deno and inspired by other generators like Jekyll, Hugo or Eleventy. I use it for all web projects I work since then.

Related with Lume I've created other projects like Vento (a JavaScript template engine) or SSX a JSX library designed for static site generators.

Random

Columnas: Co-design and development of the web version of this weekly newsletter by José Luis Antúnez.
Font Licensing Mess: Design and development of the web for this research project by María Ramos and Ana Moliz.
Online cheat sheets for jQuery and
NM type: Design and development of the web for this typographic studio founded by María Ramos (Spain) and Noel Pretorius (Sweden).
Online cheat sheets for jQuery.
Awesome design: A collection of open source resources for web designers.
Chipi: Design and interactive prototype for a desktop app to search in any service (Slack, Google Docs, Trello, etc). (Sketch prototype, chipi.io)
I collaborate in the Tarugoconf, by helping to build the website (made with Lume).
I was the guest in chapter 8 of the Galician design podcast Movendo marcos.

Code

I love to write HTML/CSS and build or experiment with very under-engineering solutions. I'm also a strong advocate of Open Source, Web standards and maintainer of several projects like:

Lume, a static site generator for Deno.
Vento, a JavaScript template engine.
Some PHP projects: PHP middlewares, PHP-Gettext, Embed, SimpleCrud or FormManager.
Some web components with accessibility and progressive enhancement in mind:
- mastodon-comments a Mastodon + Bluesky comments system.
- carousel a yet another carousel.
- page-loader to load and create fancy transitions between pages.
- horizontal-menu to create responsive horizontal menus.

What am I doing now?

I'm working as designer and developer at Cluber.
I'm the creator and maintainer, with Miguel Calvo, of the project HA!.
I'm the creator and maintainer of 🔥 Lume and 🌬Vento.

Hello. I'm Óscar Otero —digital designer