Hello.
I'm Óscar Otero
—digital designer

—Superpowers

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

—Successes

I had my own design company with 4 partners during 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 a Github repository 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 in a conference with Javier Cañada, Álvaro Valiño, Raquel Pelta, Pepe Barro and many other great designers, speaking about web and interactivity.
Being a designer, man of letters (I've studied the classical languages Latin and Greek), I've been part of a working group in PHP-FIG, discussing with engineers about a new PHP standard about Http Middlewares.
I was a member of a jury to evaluate works submitted by 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 fluid english (yet).
After many attempts, I'm not able to make a 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 galician language) about digital design, published during the Covid confinement. You can access to 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 work that I cannot share currently. This project started in 2019 and was presented in this post in 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.

Random

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 and Deno
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'm the co-designer (together with David Bonilla and Hugo Tobio) and developer of the sites for the latest editions of the Tarugoconf: Tarugoconf Sofá edition, Tarugo21 and Tarugo22. (See the code).
I had been CSS & HTML teacher at Hack a Boss

Code

I love to write HTML/CSS and build or experiment with very under-engineering solutions. I'm also a firmin advocate of the open source and maintainer of several projects like:

Lume, a static site generator for Deno.
A plugin for Figma to work with copies using Google Spreadsheets documents (code). Previously I had created the same plugin for Sketch.
Some PHP projects: PHP middlewares (a collection of PSR-15 HTTP middlewares), PHP-Gettext, (a popular PHP library to work with Gettext), Embed (to get info from any web service or page), SimpleCrud (easy and magic CRUD in SQL databases), FormManager (to create and validate form data).
Several Node tools like node-sketch (read and edit Sketch documents) and keep-a-changelog (parse and generate changelog files).
Other frontend libraries like carousel (a web component to create carousels) and page-loader (to load and create fancy transitions between pages).

What am I doing now?

I'm working as product designer at marketgoo.
I'm the creator and maintaner, with Miguel Calvo, of the project HA!.
I'm the creator and maintainer of 🔥 Lume, a static site generator for Deno.

Hello. I'm Óscar Otero —digital designer