Hi, I'm Erik Kraft: proprietor, principal, and chief obsessor-over-every-detail of Restless Bee. I've been designing and building websites professionally for the past six years, with a special emphasis on ExpressionEngine-backed site for the past two. Before going into business for myself, I worked as a web designer and front-end developer at the University of Chicago, where I had the awesome good fortune to redesign both their main homepage and College Admissions site. Since founding Restless Bee in July of 2008, my clients have included higher education institutes as well as design agencies and independent businesses of various stripes.

I'm proud to call myself an all-rounder. For instance, this past summer, my two big projects were doing a ground-up redesign for a large marketing and communication agency here in Chicago (about which, more soon—the new site isn't live yet!) and building a CMS-backed site (with a blog, e-commerce, portfolio of work, and so on) for a book publishing company in Seattle. These were mirror-image projects: for the former, my work ended with the handoff of the Photoshop file to the developers; for the latter, my work began when the designer handed the Photoshop file to me. I'm comfortable working on either side of a project. Better yet, both sides: it's always hugely satisfying to code my own designs.

When not making websites, I love old Penguin paperbacks, typespotting, running, the color orange-red, going to rock shows, and dogwatching, which is like birdwatching, except with dogs.