Neon O'Dea

UX developer, game designer, animator

What Does Neon Do?

By Daylight

Winning love. Neon builds and maintains the UI for Destiny 2, with a focus on forward-thinking flexibility & accessibility.

Prior to working in games, Neon built and maintained UX frameworks/design systems for companies at many different scales with a specialization in supporting older browsers and only using JavaScript when it was absolutely necessary.

By Moonlight

Fighting evil. Neon enjoys animating, playing games, watching cartoons, reading, singing along to musicals, & spending entirely too much time thinking & talking about mechanical keyboards.

Seriously, ask them about their collection of keyboard switches. They love the dang things.

What Has Neon Done?

Freelance

(2006-Present)

Do you have an independent game you're marketing, and need a lightweight website with beautiful animations that integrates with whatever sales platform you're using? Neon has experience working with a wide variety of platforms and is always happy to learn more, for their friends.

If you're one of Neon's friends, or have a referral from one, reach out and they very well may be able to help you out.

Here's an example of a marketing site they've built under this policy.

Preferred Technologies

Middleman, Node.js, SASS/SCSS, Vue, Netlify, Github

Bungie

(2022-Present)

Neon is a Senior Technical UX Designer at Bungie, working on Destiny 2. Technical UX Designers use Bungie's in‐house UI tools and Tech Art magic to implement UI features while also serving as cross‐functional communicators who bridge the gaps between radically different disciplines.

They work on the iconic Director interface and other systems, including: the Pathfinder system featured on The Final Shape's destination, The Pale Heart; the Bane system; and the upcoming Portal and Core Game Challenge Customization systems.

Core Technologies

Tiger Engine, Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma

Blackbox

(2016-2020)

Blackbox is a shipping company that was formed to help independent creators fulfill crowdfunding projects and transition into ongoing sales with a focus on global distribution & customer service.

When Neon started as Blackbox's sole UX developer, Blackbox had logistics, a purchasing widget, and a sales dashboard for its clients, but no ownership over the user experience for that dashboard. In a few months, they built a feature-packed design system & CSS framework that removed Blackbox's dependency on third-party CSS and created an engaging, branded experience for its clients that worked on a wide array of devices.

Over the next several years they managed the ongoing health of that design system, layering in functional & accessible improvements and refining its documentation while allowing Blackbox's designers & developers to ideate & iterate quickly while focusing on the aspects of their work that they were best at doing: delivering consistent, thought-out, performant tools for their clients & internal users.

Neon was also the sole developer on most of Cards Against Humanity's marketing sites through this period. Even the award-winning ones.

Core Technologies

Ruby on Rails, Middleman, SASS/SCSS, Angular, Vue, Webpack, CircleCI, Github

Groupon

(2011-2016)

Groupon is (was?) a marketplace for finding discounts & deals that expanded into the lucrative “basically Overstock.com” business. Honestly, who even knows what exactly it is at this point?

At Groupon, Neon's primary responsibility was developing & maintaining the deal page; as one of the most important pages to their business, this meant that they were at the nexus of many of the company's initiatives (whether that was starting to sell physical goods, a failed full-scale redesign of the site, a later successful full-scale redesign of the site, or converting a monolithic Rails stack into a fleet of lightweight Node.js apps).

Their secondary responsibility, undertaken with several fantastic front-end comrades, was taking the mess of front-end code that had been developed (often duplicated in multiple conflicting manners) as Groupon ballooned in size and turning all of that into as tidy a design system as possible. This work made Groupon's successful redesign effort possible, and appears to still be the basis of all the work they do today.

Core Technologies

Ruby on Rails, Node.js, SASS/SCSS, Stylus, Backbone.js, Jasmine, Mocha, Selenium, Jenkins, Github

How Do I Reach Neon?

For Work

Neon is not currently taking on work proposals from strangers without a referral from a past client or friend.

Generally

You can follow them on Mastodon, Bluesky, Glitch, LinkedIn, or GitHub, if you like.

For Crypto/NFT/LLM/Generative AI Stuff

You can go away.

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