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Charlie Gleason

Charlie Gleason

Designer, developer, creative coder, and musician


I’m a staff designer at Replicate, looking after developer experience at the intersection of design, code, and machine learning.

Before that I was a lead product designer at Salesforce, owned design and brand at Heroku, worked on design and front-end development for London-based crowdfunding publisher Unbound, co-founded the Melbourne-based social film site Goodfilms, and was the technical lead of the Clemenger BBDO ad agency.

I studied design and computer science, and I like the space between creativity and code. I also enjoy the blind terror of the creative process, solving difficult problems, and a clean sheet of paper.

I cannot skateboard. I tried, but it was a whole thing.


In my spare time I like to work on micro projects, from tools for creative coding, to tweet-based music videos, to design-focused macOS apps. I also sometimes write about development, contribute to open source, and share resources.

My work has been featured by Google’s Creative Sandbox, and has received numerous awards, including from Awwwards and the FWA.

I believe there are few things more comforting than good documentation.

Public private Remix routes

How to open-source a public Remix site while keeping some routes authenticated and private on Cloudflare.

Satori, Vite, Remix, Cloudflare, og my!

How to handle bundling Satori (Yoga) and Resvg WASM files for both Vite and Cloudflare.

Things I use

A list of hardware, software, and creative tools I use day-to-day.

Hello World

❯ code.charliegleason.com is a space to share code, resources, and thoughts on design and front-end development.

Awards & Achievements

  • 2024
    NewAWWWARDS, Nomination for Typography Honors, Lysterfield Lake
  • 2023
    NewAWWWARDS, Honourable Mention, Lysterfield Lake
  • 2023
    Salesforce TMP AI Hackathon, Winner for Overall Best Hack
  • 2023
    Product Hunt, Runner Up in the 2022 Golden Kitty Awards, Pika
  • 2021
    Product Hunt, Featured, Pika
  • 2019
    The Ink Award, Heroku Hanafuda Cards
  • 2017
    Typewolf, Site of the Day, Charlie Gleason
  • 2016
    The FWA, Site of the Day, Kōya
  • 2016
    AWWWARDS, Honourable Mention, Kōya
  • 2016
    Kickstarter, Projects We Love, One For Sorrow, Two For Joy
  • 2016
    The FWA, Site of the Day, Rugby
  • 2016
    AWWWARDS, Honourable Mention, Rugby
  • 2015
    The FWA, Site of the Day, I Will Never Let You Go
  • 2015
    AWWWARDS, Honourable Mention, I Will Never Let You Go
  • 2015
    Chrome Experiments, Tweetflight
  • 2014
    Futurebook Innovation Awards, Best Publisher Website, Unbound
  • 2013
    Google Sandbox, Tweetflight
  • 2013
    The FWA, Site of the Day, Tweetflight
  • 2013
    AWWWARDS, Site of the Day, Tweetflight
  • 2011
    AWWWARDS, Site of the Day, The Story of Mick Roberts
  • 2011
    Caples, Silver, Pop What You’re Not
  • 2011
    Award, Bronze, Pop What You’re Not
  • 2010
    AIMIA, Nomination for Effectiveness, Pop What You’re Not
  • 2010
    ADMA, Bronze for Art Direction / Craft, Pop What You’re Not
  • 2010
    ADMA, Silver for Automotive, Pop What You’re Not
  • 2010
    MADC, Bronze for Best Microsite, Pop What You’re Not
  • 2007
    Design Institute of Australia, Encouragement Award
  • Talks, Demos & Workshops

  • 2024
    NewPartner Summit: The Future of AppExchange
  • 2023
    Dreamforce: Designing a 5 Star Partner Listing
  • 2019
    Creative Coding London
  • 2017
    JSConf Budapest (Master of Ceremonies)
  • 2016
    Decompress: Blending WebGL and video
  • 2012
    Web Directions South: You are a developer, the internet is your friend
  • 2012
    What Do You Know: So, you are great (and so is Less CSS)
  • 2011
    What Do You Know: How to make your life more awesome with CSS3 media queries
  • Education

    Masters of Computer Science
    RMIT University, Melbourne
    2011 - incomplete
    Bachelor of Design (Multimedia Design)
    First Class Honours
    Swinburne School of Design, Melbourne
    2004 - 2007

    Certifications

  • 2022
    Salesforce User Experience (UX) Designer Certification
  • Volunteering

    • Samaritans
      2020 - 2024

    Triathlons

  • 2023
    Blenheim Palace Triathlon (Sprint)
  • 2022
    Blenheim Palace Triathlon (Sprint)
  • Half Marathons

  • 2022
    Manchester Great Run
  • 2021
    London Landmarks
  • Marathons

  • 2017
    London
  • 2015
    London
  • Ultra Marathons

  • None

  • Case Studies

    A partner-focused overhaul of publishing.

    Centralising the publishing process across multiple tenants, reducing the time to publish by 2.5x, dramatically speeding up the security review process by 3.5x, and 65% faster approvals.

    View Case Study

    An interactive, AI-augmented 3D music video.

    Powered by open-source tools, Lysterfield Lake is an AI-augmented music video about a place outside Melbourne, Australia. It's about the endless summers of your youth, and the tiny changes in you that you don't even notice adding up.

    View Case Study


    Selected Projects

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    Music Video
    Lysterfield Lake
    An interactive AI-generated 3D fever dream
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    macOS
    Pika
    An open-source colour picker app for macOS
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    Music Video
    Tweetflight
    A Twitter-powered music video
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    CLI
    Releasecast
    Tooling to help you get from .app to release
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    Library
    Sandpit
    An open-source creative-coding library
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    Microsite
    Drag It Down On You
    Lyric karaoke for Ceres, from the album of the same name
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    Music Video
    Rugby
    A GIF-powered music video
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    Music Video
    I Will Never Let You Go
    A WebGL-powered music video
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    Landing Page
    Anatole
    Landing page for the orchestral laptop maestro
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    Website
    This Kind of Agility
    Arrested Development episode selector

    Selected Articles

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    web.dev
    Testing Web Design Color Contrast
    An overview of three tools and techniques for testing and verifying accessible color contrast of your design.
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    Medium
    Introducing Pika
    An open-source colour picker app for macOS
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    Heroku
    A Rock Solid, Modern Web Stack
    Rails 5 API + ActiveAdmin + Create React App
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    Medium
    An Almost Static Stack
    How create-react-app, with a couple of modern tools, can make building static sites (with benefits) a breeze
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    Medium
    Announcing Sandpit
    A creative-coding library for the web
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    Medium
    Hot Reloading + create-react-app
    How to get hot reloading working with create-react-app
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    Medium
    An Interactive Music Video With WebGL
    Recreating After Effects in the browser

    Charlie is so gifted and productive. I would work with him again any day. It's been a great professional and personal pleasure to spend these last few years travelling in his company, and seeing the great beauty he's brought to the world through his work on Heroku. May we have the chance to do good things together again someday!

    Black and white headshot of Margaret Francis
    Margaret Francis
    Former GM
    Heroku / Salesforce

    Charlie is one of the most gifted, multi-skilled designers I have ever worked with. He's an amazing collaborator and teammate. Everything he touched made our work 1,000% better.

    Black and white headshot of Ashlyn Watters
    Ashlyn Watters
    Product Architect
    Salesforce

    What impressed me the most was his attention to every detail, his professionalism, his leadership in this space, and also his empathy and kindness. Oh did I mention he is one fantastic designer?

    Black and white headshot of Natalie Malloy
    Natalie Malloy
    Senior Director
    Salesforce

    Charlie’s nicer friends will say great things about his creativity and empathy, which is true, but not interesting. Charlie has hustle. He works and he works and he works, and that is how he got so good at what he does.

    Black and white headshot of John Barton
    John Barton
    CTO
    Amber Electric

    Charlie has a formidable blend of talents: a grounded, empathetic design sense, an artist’s eye for subversion, and the tenacity to do whatever—and learn whatever—is necessary to ship projects.

    Black and white headshot of Glen Maddern
    Glen Maddern
    Systems Engineer
    Cloudflare

    Charlie has a unique, articulate, polished understanding of design, art and how people interact and care for one another.

    Black and white headshot of Will Dayble
    Will Dayble
    Co-founder
    Squareweave

    Charlie is a supercharged teammate. When he is assigned to something, he carries it to the finish line. He has laser-focused attention to detail [and] no fear when it comes to dealing in ambiguous and new spaces.

    Black and white headshot of Vicky Zeamer
    Vicky Zeamer
    Lead Researcher, Research & Insights
    Salesforce

    [His] talent, humor, knowledge shares, thoughtfulness, storytelling, creative contributions, the list goes on! I'm grateful to have crossed paths.

    Black and white headshot of Olivia Yu
    Olivia Yu
    Lead Designer
    Salesforce

    Charlie is a developer of exceptional talent. He is personable and fun, and these qualities made him universally loved by the team around him.

    Black and white headshot of Becky Bolton
    Becky Bolton
    Former Developer
    Unbound

    [Charlie is that] near-impossible combo of crazy talented and down-to-earth.

    Black and white headshot of John Geyer
    John Geyer
    Technical Writing Lead
    Salesforce

    Typeset in Commuter Sans and the system font stack.

    Built with NextJS. CSS with Tailwind. Hosted on Heroku.

    Primary illustration inspired by The Design Squiggle.