Danny Davis, Creative TechnologistCraft, code, and the space between
Creative by nature, engineered by experience.
A director’s eye and an engineer’s hands. Twenty-four years of making creative and code, thirteen of them running Wonder Giant. Trained in film and design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, with a thesis film screened at the SCAD Film Festival.
A decade inside Chicago’s biggest agencies (Digitas, Razorfish, Manifest Digital) and thirteen years running Wonder Giant, building for award-winning restaurant groups, ad-tech platforms moving billions of impressions a day, and non-profits.
I measure success by the length of a relationship, not the number of projects. Intentionally working with kind people is what makes the years possible.
The Wonderment · 11 yrs and counting
Eleven years as one platform’s design and engineering team
A social platform for inspired people to organise real-world change. Exclusive design and development partner for over a decade.
Maple Hospitality Group · 7 yrs and counting
Eight restaurant brands, one hospitality group
Maple & Ash, Monarch, Kessaku and more. Restrained, luxurious sites for two-Michelin-star kitchens.
Greater Good Health
A care brand built around nurse practitioners
Value-based primary care led by nurse practitioners. Marketing site, brand system and recruiting pages for a fast-growing clinical network.
HealthcareFront-end
Snowsports Industries America
The winter outdoor industry’s home online
Trade association site and member tooling for the organisation that sets winter-sports industry strategy.
Non-profitWordPress
FlackTek
Precision mixing, explained clearly
Product and marketing site for a US manufacturer of bladeless high-speed mixers used everywhere from R&D benches to industrial production.
ManufacturingWordPress
One Floor Up
Nine years with an in-house video production team
Live-action video, virtual events, animation and commercials. Site development first, then a redesign and rebuild, and continuous improvement since.
VideoWordPress
MT2030
A movement of mountain communities going net-zero
A non-profit building a coalition of mountain towns committed to net-zero carbon, with conferences and workshops guiding leaders toward actionable change.
Non-profitWordPress
OpenX
A global design system and two rebuilt sites
Took an adtech marketing site and its blog down to the content and recoded both, then built the Figma system the marketing org works from.
Design systemsFigmaWordPress
The full portfolio lives at Wonder Giant.
Case studies, the client roster, and the way the studio works. All thirteen years of it.
Thirteen years running a deliberately small studio, building WordPress like software: custom-coded, version-controlled, professionally hosted, and supported for the long haul.
Startup agency before the studio
Lead interactive developer
Manifest Digital
Startup years in Chicago, working end-to-end across product, interactivity, and front-end.
Big agency years
Interactive developer
Digitas & Razorfish (Avenue A)
Big-agency Chicago: campaign, brand and platform work for national clients, and the craft habits that came with it.
Where it started
BFA, Film & Television: Directing · Design
Savannah College of Art and Design
Four years split between the director’s chair and design tools. Final thesis film screened in the theater at the SCAD Film Festival.
How I work
Custom code, version-controlled from the first commit.
A design system before the first screen, so every screen after it is faster and consistent.
You work with the person who wrote it.
A few partners at a time, by choice.
Custom made tooling
Wonderpress.
Treating WordPress like software means having the tooling software has. So I built it. Wonderpress is the internal platform every Wonder Giant project runs on. It manages the build process, migrates projects onto newer frameworks, handles deployments, and keeps local environments in sync with the servers they mirror.
It is one way we’ve been able to maintain sites for a decade: the work that would otherwise be repeated by hand on every project happens once, in one place, and improves for every client at the same time.
Internal platformBuild toolingDevOps
01
Build pipeline
Asset compilation, dependency management and release packaging standardised across every project, so we can pick up any of our projects and understand the framework it’s built on.
02
Framework migration
Moves older projects onto current frameworks without a rebuild. It is the reason a decade-old site can still be running current code.
03
Deployment
Managed, repeatable deploys. Shipping a change is a routine act rather than an event.
04
Environment sync
Pulls remote servers down to local in one step, so what I develop against is what is actually running. Consistency is the whole point.
Experiments
Work I made to answer a creative itch rather than a brief.
Bally Total Fitness · 2011
Bally Results Center interactive wall
A Kinect, a four-panel video wall, and six months of code so members could see their results by walking up to it.
A bullet-time film site: live-action footage shot from an array of angles, rebuilt in the browser so you could stop the action and orbit around it. Built with director Scott. The project was picked up and featured by a Canadian design magazine.
Interactive Design Archive
Founder · Editor · multi-year
A publication I ran for years documenting the interactive field at its peak, which earned interviews with some of the sharpest minds working in interactive technology at the time. Since retired.
Generative texture paintings
Generative art · ongoing
Code that crawls over my own photography and re-renders it as a living texture painting. The image never settles, it keeps repainting itself.
Ongoing experiments
Experiment · ongoing
A standing pile of small builds: a webcam taught to read a blinking light back into words, and Chronometer, a series of experimental clocks, each one a different argument about how to show time.
Outside the studioThe same instinct, off the clock.
Bird-call detectors
Machine listening trained on birdsong, running season after season giving me a picture of which feathered friends are visiting throughout the year.
Home automation
Coordinating lights with sunsets, and soil sensors with sprinklers. Half of it is genuinely useful, half exists because I wanted to see if it would work.
The garden
Designed, built, and planted a bit at a time. Years in, it’s still not finished — which I’m told is how gardens go.
Woodworking
Deck roofs, herringbone facade, a shed, and railings. Out of development and into the physical space.
Style & approach
Where the work comes from, and how it gets made.
Style
A visual education, then a decade of making things move.
I came up through film. Four years at SCAD studying directing (framing, pacing, where the eye goes and how long it stays) alongside graphic design, which taught the same instincts on a static page. Both disciplines are about sequence and emphasis, and neither of them is decoration.
Then came the Flash years: highly animated sites and experiments where the timeline and the code were the same document. You could not separate the design from the build, because moving something on screen meant writing the thing that moved it. That is where the two halves of what I do fused, and I have worked that way ever since.
It still shows up in the small things: how a page reveals itself, when something should hold still, why a transition is 200 milliseconds and not 600.
Fig. 3 · Thesis film, screened at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival
Approach
Only work with intentionally kind people
Not merely polite, but deliberately kind, on the hard days as well as the easy ones. It is a real filter, applied honestly, and it has never cost me anything worth keeping. The work is better when nobody is bracing for the next call.
A small team, on purpose
Wonder Giant has stayed deliberately small for thirteen years. A few partners at a time is the only way the people you meet stay the people doing the work. No junior hand-offs, no account manager relaying decisions to someone you never speak to.
WordPress, chosen by consensus
Picking a platform is a research problem, and the honest answer is to follow the crowd that has already done the research. WordPress runs an enormous share of the web, which means a deep well of knowledge, plugins, hosting and hiring. I would rather borrow that collective judgement than defend a clever, lonely stack.
Treated like software, not a template
For clients ready to graduate from the drag-and-drop world: custom code, version-controlled from the first commit, a real build process, and an environment that can be maintained years from now. The platform is ordinary on purpose; what gets built on it is not.
Built to stay
The engagements that matter run five, six, eleven years. That changes how you build: systems designed to be extended, and the same person still around who knows why every decision was made.
Entirely word of mouth
Every client has arrived through someone who worked with me before. There is no ad spend and no pipeline, which means treating people well is not a value statement, it is the whole business model.
Every client arrived by word of mouth. Treating people well isn’t a value, it’s the business model.
Working together
Three ways engagements usually start.
Most begin as one of these and become the third.
01
Design system
An audit or a build: colour, type, spacing and components as one source of truth in Figma, matched by real coded components. The point is that screen twenty costs a fraction of screen one.
Teams whose brand has drifted, or who are about to hire designers and want them to agree.
02
Develop
A site designed and coded by the same person. Custom code, version-controlled from the first commit, no page builders and no pile of plugins holding it together.
Organisations who have outgrown a template and need the next site to last more than a few years.
03
Ongoing partnership
A continuing relationship rather than a project with an end date: hosting and maintenance handled, and design and development that keeps going. You run the day-to-day content; I shape everything else.
Partners who would rather have a team than a vendor. A few at a time, by choice.
New work
Projects go through the studio.
This page is a personal record, not an inbox. If you have something to build, Wonder Giant is where that conversation starts, and we work with intentionally kind people, which isn’t negotiable.
