G.T. Barnes – Digital Product Designer

Gary Barnes

Digital Product Designer

& Content Producer

Born and raised in San Diego, my work as a digital product designer and media producer led me to projects across the West Coast, prior to landing in the Pacific Northwest roughly ten years ago.

With a degree in Communication (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of California San Diego, and a lifelong passion for tech, my entire career has focused on the intersection of creative mediums with emerging technologies.

My work as a photographer spans eighteen countries (as of 2022), with an emphasis on capturing snapshots of daily life. In addition to this, my commercial portfolio spans multiple genres including portraiture, event, product, and architectural photography.

Recent Commercial

Hewn

Digital Product Design & Media Production

As the sole individual responsible for building and maintaining Hewn’s website (view here ), online presence, and brand-image, I helped the company grow from a simple zero-budget idea in 2013 to an industry leader with a national presence and eight-figure yearly sales. Every image and video asset used in Hewn’s website and marketing was produced in-house by myself, with the sole exception of any images where a photographer was already contracted to the construction project. Everything from the server infrastructure to the final design is handled solely by myself as well.

The site continues to undergo frequent A/B market testing in order to make sure that the layout and content is appropriate for B2B and B2C users alike. The website produces daily leads, and is used as both an educational tool and a sales tool to facilitate growth on a national level.

In addition to the public-facing website, I have developed various web-based tools over the years to facilitate performance throughout all levels of the company. This includes various pricing calculators for direct sales and sales reps, time-management systems for employees in manufacturing, and project-tracking systems that combined physical hardware with a web-based backend to track projects as they moved through the manufacturing process.

Hewn Website (view here )

Digital & Print Marketing

Hewn’s marketing practices have undergone multiple phases, including targeted ad-spending and social media presence to generate initial growth, and direct marketing to focus on retention and grassroots awareness. With limited traceable data to work with, due to the vastly offline nature of sales in the wood industry, alternative techniques had to be developed in order to correlate marketing practices with revenue performance on a monthly and quarterly basis. This analysis uncovered new and surprising marketing-to-sales pathways that helped grow and sustain leads during times of industry hardship and seasonal sales cycles.

The start of the pandemic brought new challenges in the quest to grow Hewn’s market presence. On my own initiative, I developed a print catalog for the brand (view here ) that brought our marketing efforts to the physical world. This catalog quickly became a vital tool for in-house and independent sales reps, and correlated with Hewn’s sales volume more than tripling in size through 2021 and 2022. I have recently introduced hardcover look-books (view here ) to target high-end clientele as well, which facilitates brand-confidence in an industry where such marketing tools are uncommon.

Look Book (view here )

Catalog article incorporating travel photography - Hewn Catalog, Spring 2020 Edition

Recent Personal

Equitti

Web App w/ Python Backend (Unreleased)

Equitti is a Progressive Web App designed with a Python backend that allows an individual to automate stock market trades on an end-of-day basis, using strategies designed in the commercial service Composer Trade. Filling in gaps in Composer’s functionality, Equitti allows the user to host their own dedicated VM in the cloud, with a continuously running daemon that executes trades using a lightweight script that runs separate from the web app codebase, and which updates account statistics throughout the trading day.

Equitti is an experiment in Python programming, API interfacing, VM infrastructure management, and design aspects including Neumorphism and dynamically-updating content. It is currently a fully functioning product.

Travel Highlights

Personal Photo Project (view here ↗)

Traveler with a Camera is a continuous and long-running project to capture scenes of life throughout the world while on my travels. Started in 2015, this project has taken me to eighteen countries across four continents (as of 2022), and has produced nearly 100,000 images that continue to be distilled into new collections. Work from this series has been displayed locally in Portland, Oregon, and various images have generated sales through stock agencies for print and web.

Highlights include documenting juxtapositional scenes of life in Sarajevo (2016), an experiment in post-processing infrared simulation at Machu Picchu (2018), and documenting daily life in Japan (2020) at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.