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Marco Chaves.

About

I’m Marco — a systems engineer who went sideways into the visual end of the web and stayed there for eleven years.

Most of those years have been spent on pharmaceutical work, which is a strange and specific corner of front-end development. The surfaces are small, the rules are absolute, and the copy is legally immutable. A display unit has a weight budget an ad server enforces. A CLM deck runs on an iPad with no signal. A congress panel is unattended for ten hours. An email renders in Word.

None of those environments forgive improvisation, and all of them reward someone who reads the constraint first and designs into it. That is the part of the job I like — the puzzle of making something feel effortless inside a box that was never meant to hold it.

I work in vanilla JavaScript and GSAP more often than in any framework, because the right answer for a 100 KB ad unit is not the right answer for an application — this site ships no framework at all. I build the pipeline before I build the thirtieth unit. And I care a great deal about motion that knows when to get out of the way.

Four of the pieces on this site were built from scratch under an invented brand, because the real ones belong to their clients. They’re labelled wherever they appear.

Experience

  1. 2021 — present

    Senior Creative Engineer

    Saatchi Wellness · Publicis Production

    Promoted to Senior in 2023. Veeva CLM presentations, congress touchscreen panels, HTML5 ad units, HTML email and microsites for Pfizer, AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genentech, Astellas, Dynavax and Exact Sciences.

  2. 2016 — 2021

    Creative Engineer

    Prodigious · now Publicis Production

    Same employer as above, under its former name. Animated HTML5 display advertising across DoubleClick Studio, FlashTalking, Celtra and Adobe Animate, plus video units in After Effects and 3D in Blender, for Bank of America, Citi, USAA, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft, Pampers, Pop-Tarts, Five Guys, JennAir and HPE.

  3. 2014 — 2016

    Front-End Developer

    Accenture · Webydi · freelance

    Animated banners, advertising email, landing pages and small-business websites end to end.