About Me

I got my start in 2001 as a Graphic Artist making merch for my band, and then a friend’s band, and then a website for my band, and then Myspace themes for tons of bands! So I decided to really learn HTML & CSS, landed my first job as a “WebMaster” at a radio station in my hometown (remember Macromedia Dreamweaver?), and I’ve been building for the world wide web ever since! 

In 2007, the freelance design business was going well enough for me to purchase After Effects for the first time. After completing Videocopilot.net’s free “After Effects Basic Training” I bought a book on Cinema4D and have been following Greyscalegorilla.com since it was Nick’s photography and photoshop-tips blog. I started finding any and every excuse to incorporate animation, video, and motion into my work.

In 2013 I was working at a mobile-first startup and was hired as a “Front End Designer”. The job was where I found my niche as I was on a team of 3 designers and was tasked to focus on prototyping. At first, I built HTML/JS prototypes to run in my local client to validate UI patterns and experiment with web trickery, pulling off more complex UI animations than what is capable in InVision. Tools like Pixate and Framer.js were still underground and I wasn’t hip to that scene yet. However, I very quickly began outgrowing tools like InVision so I started mocking up entire sequences of app events and animations in After Effects.

Prototyping changed the game for me - designing interactions and using animation to reinforce the information presented by or to the user was the most interesting problem space.

Right now as we are ending out 2021 I have seen my career take off as an individual contributor, designing software for developer productivity. I am building enterprise tools developers need to be more productive. When I am not on customer calls or prototyping usability tests, I am helping to refactor and build out a growing component library which we intent to mature into a design system in 2023.

All in all, for the past 20 years I have been designing and building software and I have fallen in love with human and computer interaction. I am always studying & striving to understand what users need when they want it, and building interfaces that foster human success & happiness (aka The User Experience). Please view my LinkedIn profile to read more about my work experience in San Francisco, California as well as what I’m up to currently.

tl;dr - I teach computers how to use humans.

When I am not working my nine to five (more like ten-thirty to seven at night) I have my hands on too many projects. You can see a sample on my Dribbble profile page or here in my “playground” but be warned that place is a mess…

I write and record demos over on Soundcloud and have released an EP as The Sight & The Sound which you can listen to right now.

I am also working on designing, producing, publishing, and releasing an NFT skateboarding game + collection drop for 2022. There are quite a few blockchain projects I’m a part of which I will be revealing via LedgerRecords.com later in 2023. I’m also an avid cook and I’m working on refining my wine palette. No one paid me to type that I’m being honest.

Finally, I started an inclusive and equitable gaming community. I’ll be building iLikeToPlay.co and I run a Discord Server where friends game and socialize (come on over to Discord and say hi).

If you like to get into trouble and are currently involved in any adjacent or similar projects and would like to team up then I think that would be amazing. Please reach out and lets talk shop!

Rebuilding ChadBercea.com

I am currently rebuilding ChadBercea.com and all of this stuff will go away soon. For now, I’ll be building this out the old way: text only. And as I get my site migrated away from Squarespace and onto Webflow, we’ll start to see this page come alive.