Square Design Summit
Role: Design Technologist
The Square Design Summit is Square's annual internal conference bringing together the design community across the company. For the 2023 event, I volunteered to lead front-end development on the conference microsite alongside another Design Technologist, building a custom experience that doubled as both a marketing brochure and a functional event hub. I architected the site using vanilla JavaScript, WebGL, and Contentful, with content hosted in a Google Spreadsheet and pulled into Contentful so the strategy team could manage copy in a familiar format without juggling multiple sources of truth.
A WebGL microsite for Square's design community
The site featured a dynamic shader background written in GLSL with section-based theming, powered by a flexible event bus that synced scroll position with shader state in real time using GSAP ScrollTrigger. I also built a dynamic schedule that converted Unix timestamps into the user's local time and sequentially ordered sessions by start time and day, removing timezone friction for a globally distributed audience.
The WebGL shader background drew inspiration from probability density plots of hydrogen atoms, translating a scientific visual language into an ambient, interactive backdrop for the event. Designers shaped the visual direction while our team prototyped the motion and interaction in code.
The shader in full
The site left the community inspired and showcased what Design Technologists could deliver when given creative ownership over a high-visibility internal moment.