About Justin Chick
I’ve been building websites since 2010 and running my own businesses for almost as long. That combination shapes most of how I approach client work.
I take accessibility seriously and care about how things actually render, behave, and hold up over time. Not just how they look in a design review.
The work and the years
I’ve been making websites professionally since 2010, back when you turned PSDs into HTML by hand and “responsive design” was a new idea worth arguing about. A lot has changed. The craft of it still gets me.
For a few years I was Lead Interactive Designer at Hanley Wood, a B2B media company behind publications like Architect, Builder, and Remodeling magazines. That’s where I got to build things at a scale most freelancers don’t: leading front-end development for interactive editorial features, helping rebuild the front-end architecture across 16 brand sites, and collaborating with engineers, editors, and UX teams week to week. The work earned some recognition along the way, including a handful of Azbee Awards from the American Society of Business Publication Editors and a Folio Digital Award. I’m proud of that chapter.
Before and after Hanley Wood I’ve been mostly on my own: freelancing, co-founding a couple of small digital agencies, building client sites, and starting Worlds End Books. Running your own things teaches you stuff you can’t learn any other way.
How I think
I tend to approach problems as systems. What are the parts, how do they connect, where does it break down? That lens applies whether I’m untangling a client’s content strategy, figuring out why their conversion rate is soft, or deciding how a WordPress theme should be architected.
A lot of what I know I learned from the open source community: building with WordPress, Bootstrap, Tachyons, Basscss, Roots Sage, reading other people’s code, absorbing their thinking. That’s still how I stay sharp.
What I believe about the web
A good website is readable, and I mean that more broadly than clear writing and decent contrast. Readable to the widest reasonable audience. That means semantic HTML, accessibility from the start rather than bolted on at the end, and dark mode as a real design consideration. Most visitors aren’t experiencing your site under ideal conditions, and it’s worth designing for that.
I think about things like font rendering for people with dyslexia. I think about what happens when someone’s on a slow connection, or using assistive technology, or just having a hard day and needs the thing to work without friction. Most websites get this wrong not out of malice but out of habit, designing for the person who made the thing rather than the person who needs it.
Outside the browser
I’m currently working toward a degree in Applied Plant and Soil Science at UMass Amherst’s Stockbridge School of Agriculture. It’s a long way from CSS, and also not that far. Systems are systems. It rounds me out and keeps me curious, which I think makes me a better designer.
I live and work in Belchertown, MA.