Jesús Rascón

design, animation and data

Founder and creator of the Design Bits channel, where we talk about computational design. All things art, but make it digital.

I am currently a Technical Producer of sorts at Graphext, arguably the fastest and most powerful analytics tool there is available in the market.

I've also worked as a freelance technical content creator with channels like Veritasium and Reducible, crafting animations earning +60 million impressions.

I am also an avid bass player, and overall chord enjoyer. Check it out at HSX.

The Stuff™

Non exhaustive list of silly things I've built. No promises.
Tractor

An automated scraping tool
Svelte's Advent of Code 2023

A set of 24 prompts to sharpen your Svelte skills
Pangea

The country guessing game
Tramos IRPF

Tax calculator for freelancers in Spain
Cycles

Tiny Little Habit Tracker
Processing Fellowship Proposal

A presentation of Mathemagical.js, with Greg Stanton
Spanish General Elections 2023 Map

Visualization of the results, per district
El Metro

Tram tracking extremely simple
Font Guesser

An unfinished font guessing game
FOCAL-ES

A database with exhaustive information on focal particles
Chord Chart Maker

An unfinished jazz-style chord chart for quick idea sharing
Custom Blending Modes

Quick prototype about a hypothetical blend mode editor
CC Fest Slides

Slides I gave for my presentation on the '22 CC Fest!

Experience & Background

A little sum up of the path I've followed so far

Graphext

Design Engineer, Content Creation

Graphext being quite a small startup, everyone wears lots of hats.

I worked on Tractor 2.0, a revival of a beautiful scraping tool on top of Apify, quite useful for very quickly bringing social media data to be analyzed within Graphext. The main focus was being able to get a useful social-media dataset quickly, easily and efficiently. The interface was designed with a great deal of care, and tons of invisible details make your experience as smooth as possible to download a piece of data. This makes for a great compainon to Graphext, where you can readily analyze what you just downloaded.

Additionally, I was in charge of writing and maintaining the ever growing documentation for the tool, almost from scratch. Special emphasis was considered to make it as easy as possible to understand what Graphext can offer you, while still providing with great, dense documents that answer any of your questions. You will also find me in the youtube channel, creating tutorials and producing videos that showcase the tool or explain some complex topic.

This one is funny because Alex, one of my best friends, got to meet Victoriano, the CEO. Alex put us in contact and it turns out we get on very well. Eventually, I got to meet the team at their beautiful office in Madrid.

Prisms of Reality

Technical Content Creator

In June, 2023, I joined the incredible Prisms team as a technical content creator, creating and animating 500+ explainer video assets in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemsitry and sciences through animation engineering.

All this was executed within quite intense workloads and very tight deadlines, where managing and organizing your own work was key in order to get things done. Special care was put into communication, coordinating with my teammates to avoid confusion and remove blocking paths among the quite complex task that is is working in a startup.

Fortunately, these videos helped kids get around the game and understand complex concepts in an accessible, fun way.

Design Bits

Founder

Around March, 2023 I created the Design Bits channel, to talk about computational design. Much of the influence I've gathered from past experiences can be easily picked up in this project.

We discuss the inner workings of the tools designers use daily in a hopefully accessible and attractive manner.

Graphic Design, Video Production, Music Production and Programming are disciplines that I want to keep as close to my heart as possible. This channel is a successful attempt at doing so. Every asset, animation, song or sound effect is created from scratch, in my room. Being able to control the interplay between all the elements makes me incredibly happy.

'22 Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code Contributor

In June, 2022 I proposed the Processing Foundation –through the GSOC program– a very important change to the p5.js library that had been asked for ages: native GIF export.

The p5.js community is largely stablished in Twitter, where GIF sharing was the main way for artists to show their works in progress, as well as the finished pieces.

But GIF exporting was very cumbersome, usually requiring the user to download every single frame as a png for later composition, or using tools that either did not work properly or needed an unreasonable amount of setup.

I am very proud to say that we managed to create this feature and make it as easy as it's ever been to download a GIF from your sketch.

Reducible

Art Direction & Animation Engineering

Helped develop a clearer brand identity for the channel, helping it stand out among a rapidly growing community of educational math channels. I also contributed directly to the creation of the animations needed, made through code. Kind of like animation engineering.

My journey as a freelancer was blessed when I joined the Reducible youtube channel as an Art Director and Animator. Nipun, the creator and founder of the channel, gave me the most welcoming time and we formed a team to improve the channel from the ground up.

This project really holds a special place in my heart, since I was so early in my career but still, he trusted me and allowed me to explore and exploit all the possibilities. No judgement, no bullshit, just vibes and code.

Animation engineering comes from the fact that all animations were made through code.

Freelancer

I guess every role?

In September, 2021 I started my career as a freelancer. I had just come out of my masters and had absolutely no idea nor properly developed skill. The only thing I had clear was to avoid as hard as I possibly could joining some generic big consultancy corporation to do lame stuff. Top 1 best decisions I've ever made.

During this time, I worked with the Veritasium team as an animation engineer, making mathematical animations in Manim. This would shape the rest of my career as I would choose this path onwards and specialize in this branch of content creation.

I also started my career as a design engineer, something I didn't know at the time. I started tinkering with Next.js and Svelte and made some websites for fun and for my local university.

MSc Data Science

Masters in Data Science @ University of Granada

Got my masters in Data Science through the year of 2020. Learned that you won't need much more than a simple linear regression in 90% of the cases you have to estimate some data. I also got a lot into data visualization and design.

BSc Computer Science

Bachelors in Computer Science @ University of Jaén

From 2016 through 2020 I completed my degree in Computer Science. I didn't have a great time during the first years, I was really bad at algorithms, math and hardcore programming in general. It wouldn't be until 3rd year that I started to take off and enjoy the process.

Today I can very confidently say that programming, algorithms and math make me very happy. Not an obvious choice, but probably the right one.

Music studies

I basically started playing guitar

At some point during the summer of 2013 I managed to convice mom to buy me a guitar. Sometime later I started attending guitar lessons from one of the best teachers I will ever know, Yeye.

Like many other things, this would completely fill up my mind and change my entire life, but I didn't know that yet.

2024