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, making it possible for merchants to build websites that actually look like their brand, not a template. I owned style-related features in the site editor: layout, typography, color, imagery.

I was also a major contributor to Orbit, the Vue.js design system shared across all eCommerce products.

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 the drag-and-drop website builder, acquired by Square in 2018.

I was on the Design Engineering team, building the design system and shipping UI across 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 peer-to-peer car sharing. Think Airbnb for cars.

I joined as a UI Engineer, grew into leading the Web Engineering team, and had my hands on most of the consumer-facing web product.

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

The original JavaScript library for overlaying images on a web page. A small script that became a ubiquitous UI pattern and entered the lexicon. "Lightbox" is now a generic term for any content overlay on the web.

Demo and docs 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

A JavaScript library for grabbing the dominant color and palette from any image. Used for dynamic theming, adaptive UIs, and anywhere you want a design to respond to its content.

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

Generate consistent, accessible color ramps from a few base colors. Built for design systems where you need predictable palettes, not just pretty ones.

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

Type a word, pick a font, get ASCII art. A fast, no-fuss title generator for 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
2022

Minesweeper with a quirky, retro twist. 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
2021

NYT Spelling Bee, rebuilt for multiplayer. I made it so my mom, sister, and I could play together. They're the word game fans in the family.

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.