Lokesh Dhakar

Graphic Designer turned Software Engineer with 15+ years experience focusing on roles that mix design and engineering.

You might know me as the creator of the original Lightbox script.

Last 3 Jobs

Square's logo mark - a black rounded square outline with another rounded square inside
Square
Software Engineer & Designer
2018-2022

I worked on the eCommerce team at Square focusing on the following areas:

1: Helping merchants translate their brand online. I worked on our website editor's style related features: layout, typography, color, imagery, et al.

2: Orbit, a design system built in Vue.js. It is utilized in all eCommerce products. I was a major engineering contributor as well as a design contributor.

View live
variety of mobile websites showing diverse visual styles
Example customer websites created with our editor.
screenshot of an interface for designing and building a website
The website editor UI showing style options on the left and a preview on the right.

Weebly logo mark - a letter bubbly W on a blue background
Weebly
Software Engineer & Designer
2015-2018

Weebly was a web design and hosting company known for it's drag and drop website editor. We were acquired by Square in 2018.

I was on the Design Engineering team where I worked on building the design system as well as constructing UI for the product and marketing site.

weebly.com homepage screenshot showing a smiling customer and an example website
weebly.com homepage
screenshot of the UI of the weebly website editor which shows a toolbar on the left and a preview of the website on the right
Drag-and-drop editor

Getaround logo mark - lowercase letter g on a bright purple background
Getaround
Lead Engineer on Web
2012-2015

Getaround is a car sharing company, think Airbnb for cars.

I joined as a UI Engineer and eventually led the Web Engineering team. I touched most web features and managed two other engineers.

View live
three screenshots of mobile web interfaces from getaround.com showing searching for a car to rent, info on booked trips, and info on a specific car

Open Source Projects

Lightbox
Author and Maintainer
two thousand and fifteen

Original Javascript library for overlaying images on top of the current page. Freeing you from the constraints of the page layout and letting you show images at larger size. Lightbox introduced this new pattern to the web, which is now ubiquitous, and has become a generic term for overlaying content on a page.

Demo and docs Github ★6k Wikipedia
an image of the Golden Gate Bridge in a white frame that is overlaid on top of a website that has been dimmed by an overlay
Lightbox opened up with the first image of a series.
Color Thief
Author and Maintainer
two thousand and thirteen

Javascript library to extract color palettes from images, allowing for new techniques such as UIs that adapt their palette to an image.

Demo and docs Github ★12k
three photographs of diverse subjects, below each is a swatch of color labeled dominant color, and another set of ten color swatched labeled palette
Three images and their extracted color palettes.
Color Stacks
Creator and Maintainer
two thousand and twenty

A color palette generator for design systems.

View live Github
a screenshot of a dense interface with a variety of controls for generating and modifying colors
ASCII Today
Creator
two thousand and seventeen

A super-fast ASCII title generator for sprucing up code comments and readmes.

View live Github
screenshot a UI that shows the word Hello! written in a variety of ascii fonts, often using slashes and other non alphabetical characters to construct the letters

Games

Bitsweeper
Author
two thousand and twenty-two

A quirky, retro take on Minesweeper playable in the browser.

Play
three screenshots of a mobile web game similar to Minesweeper, showing blocks on a grid, some empty space, and some with numbers
Team Bee
Author
two thousand and twenty-one

Spelling Bee word game, remade for teams. I made this to enjoy with my family, as my mom and sister are big word game fans.

three screenshots of a mobile web game showing a 7 letters in a hexagon pattern in the first and guesses of words constructed with those letter in the following
dense UI interface for generating puzzles for the game with tables of puzzle options
Admin tool for generating new puzzles and managing the dictionary.