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About Me

Ken Cox I'm a front-end web developer for URBN living in Newark, Delaware, USA. If you've ever bought anything online from Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie or Free People, you've used some of my code. On the side, I have a group of long-term freelance clients that I make deliriously happy as kencox design.

Long long ago...

I started playing on 8-bit home computers as a kid in the early 80's - huge boxy things my dad brought home from work - and wrote my first lines of code in BASIC. I'd also always loved art, and went to college thinking I'd be making a living with paint and paper. But why then was I sneaking over to the computer labs to take programming courses? By graduation, desktop publishing and computer aided design had firmly taken root, and I started my career designing ads in Quark Express and Photoshop for a weekly newspaper. While I enjoyed being a designer I was absolutely fascinated with the World Wide Web, which combined programming with graphics and design. I wrote my first web page after reading a basic HTML article in Byte Magazine in 1995, launched my own personal site in 1996, and was the webmaster for a national chain of bicycle stores two years later.

Working for a series of advertising agencies (none of which still survive), I'd learn some new bit of technology one day (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Flash) and be pitching a project using it to a client the next. After working my way up to the lofty title of "Interactive Manager", I made the jump to enterprise IT, working both as a front-end developer and UX designer at a series of banks with a dozen Agile teams and multi-million dollar projects. During this time I began to specialize in web accessibility, and became an A11Y champion, educating developers and executives alike on how the web should be for everyone. In 2019, I left finTech for eCommerce and found it incredibly refreshing to work on a site that people visit for enjoyment instead of just to pay their bills.

Looking back, my job title has included various arrangements of the words "designer", "developer", "UX", "web", "front-end" and "engineer", and I've completed online and interactive projects of all sizes across a variety of industries including financial, pharma, B2B, tradeshow/exhibit, healthcare and eCommerce. Recently, I've been managing our web intern program to share my knowledge with the next generation of talent - young developers who will never know a world where you can't Google an error message or ask an AI for help.