DILLON KEISTER
About
You just want my resume? Okay, check it out. 👉
I started my foray into messing with computers by running a custom Xanga layout "business" wherein I would code my friends and crushes HTML layouts for their middle school blogs featuring their favorite pop-punk bands or stolen Threadless graphics. I'd already been a fan of making a geocities page for whatever niche interest I'd been researching that week in grade school, and the freedom of custom HTML was exciting and new. I could impress my twenty-some blog followers with my literary genius about the mundanities of teenage adolescence and my carefully-selected embedded My Chemical Romance song.
I grew up alongside the publicly accessible internet, so didn't really consider developing as more than a tool to share online about my other passions. I loved the puzzle-solving of code, but for years it was a means to an end, to show off my comic book drawings or latest goofy storytelling slideshow I'd composed in Powerpoint instead of working on my English assignment.
Studying psychology in university, the internet was an academic space. Wikipedia was still getting disparaged by my professors, despite often having more up-to-date information than many of my textbooks. It felt exciting and new to organize my data through spreadsheets on the cloud, conducting research surveys through a password-protected website, and hoping I had the right e-mail address to reach my participants.
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I thought maybe I stepped away from tech when I graduated and dove into full-time baking. I climbed the ranks (if you can say there are any?) at the local vegan co-operative bakery quickly, to be a manager and then a worker-owner. With a co-operative democratic board, we tried to reach consensus on major decisions, but many folks deferred to me to make decisions on technical calls. After all, I was the one with the B.S. and the ancient Xanga business, right? I played around with redesigning our website and took the lead on reformatting all of our recipes and procedures to lessen user error with our baking team, all while claiming I wasn't into procedural stuff, organizing, or computers anymore. Just kidding!! Please let me clean up your Google Drive!!
I continued to do this level of work for years in every organization I was involved in, from other kitchens to volunteering with community groups. Recently, I reinvigorated the Columbus Community Pride website, an annual festival as part of Pride month that centers the voices and experiences of BIPOC LGBTQ+ people in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. I get excited about projects like this, where it's people I know and work alongside in the streets and we both want to see the other succeed. This is true, too, of the work I've done behind the scenes for the DIY punk music calendar Columbus Sucks Because You Suck. How can we promote the art of people who make flyers for punk shows and promote the shows themselves in one place?
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Anyway, I want to help people and I want my designs to help people. I want to help you to help your organization to help people. Help me help you help them help others. Let's do this thing.