Vitals

I live in Toronto and read a lot. I write, edit, and make websites for fun and profit.

Likes: magazines, progressive politics, non-profit media, contemporary art, bread, typography, css, Instapaper, sustainability, colourful 19th century robber-barons, microbreweries.

Dislikes: talking on the phone, standing on escalators.

Blog RSS

Contact

Ways to find me, in descending order of usefulness:

• gfscott at gmail (PGP Key)
• 416-889-9708 (SMS, Signal, WhatsApp)
• Github
• Bluesky
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• 416-889-9708 (phone call; please note I don’t have voicemail.)
• Username squats: Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress.com, Tumblr, Pinterest, Skype, Threads
• Deleted profiles or dead websites: About.me, App.net, Blekko, Ello, Findings, Flickr, Foursquare, Glos.si, Google+, Hunch, Posterous, Protocol.by, Quora, Shortmail

Work

Currently

I work as a senior product content designer at Shopify, focused on developer experience and the third-party ecosystem.

Previously

I started in traditional print editorial but over time shifted into digital roles, including app development. I still keep one toe in the magazine world by volunteering as a judge for annual competitions like the National Magazine Awards, the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, and more.

From May 2012 to June 2018 I worked at Rogers Publishing in several editorial roles, including projects for Canadian Business, Maclean’s, and MoneySense.

From August 2008 to December 2011, I edited This Magazine. This was named Small Magazine of the Year by the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors three years running, a five-time gold winner in the small-circulation category of the Canadian Newsstand Awards, and called “the best Canadian magazine you’ve never read” by the United Church Observer. I received an honourable mention from the Professional Writers’ Association of Canada in their 2011 Editor of the Year Awards.

Before that, I was an associate editor at Canadian Business Assistant Editor of Precedent, News Editor and then Editor-in-Chief of The Varsity, and a freelance writer with contributions to Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, U of T Magazine, and more.

Here are a few representative clippings from this time:

• Toxic Nostalgia (Aggregation Magazine)
• Europeans draining bank accounts (Canadian Business)
• Profile of NDP MP Megan Leslie (This Magazine)
• The myth of peak masculinity (This Magazine)
• The virtual search for the perfect roommate (U of T Magazine)
• House work (Precedent)
• Games get down to business (The Globe and Mail)
• When stun guns go bad (Maclean’s)

Code

I love tinkering with web technologies and learn best by building stuff.

• Embed Everything: A collection of Eleventy plugins for easily embedding media in Markdown, using only URLs.
• Huge on Facebook (Deprecated): A jQuery plugin to programmatically display the number of Facebook likes for a given batch of links.
• Provincely: A symbol font for making lightweight, responsive, and semantic maps of Canada with HTML and CSS. Not deprecated because technically this technique still works, but there are better ways to do this today. (Based on Stately by Ben Markowitz of Intridea).

Teaching

I teach The Online Publishing Toolkit in the Magazine and Web Publishing program at Ryerson University’s Chang School of Continuing Education. The course was introduced in January 2013 and is aimed at magazine professionals who want to better understand the technologies behind current trends in digital publishing.

Design

Increasingly people want websites instead of magazine articles, and I can live with that. I specialize in built-to-order Wordpress sites.

• The SpiderWebShow — A collaboration between Toronto’s Praxis Theatre and Canada’s National Arts Centre, this site is a venue for digital theatre and experiments with performance and the Internet. I acted as designer-developer and “digital dramaturg.”
• Bull Dog Coffee — A simple, mobile-optimized site for Bull Dog Coffee, my local coffee shop. (I got paid in lattes.)
• The Wrecking Ball — Custom Wordpress theme for a national network of political theatre festivals.
• David Hayes — Custom Wordpress theme for a Toronto-based freelance writer.
• Praxis Theatre — Custom Wordpress theme for a Toronto theatre company.
• This.org — Second redesign of This Magazine’s website. Bespoke HTML5 Wordpress theme.
• Ski Canada Magazine — Redesign of Canada’s largest ski title, including bespoke Wordpress template.
• HowLongHasRobFordBeenMayor.com — A single-serving site to count the days of Toronto's current mayor. Update: It now has an open API. Seriously.
• WebEditors.org — A single-serving site/e-handout I made with Megan McChesney for our June 2010 presentation to MagNet.
• Department of Culture — A blog for a coalition of arts workers formed in response to Canada's 2008 federal election (of which I was a founding member). A bespoke Wordpress theme, made with HTML5 Boilerplate.
• Tiny Alligator Music — Website for Toronto composer Caitlin Smith.
• Alison Garwood-Jones — Wordpress-based portfolio for Toronto freelancer.

Presentations

I enjoy public speaking and sometimes get the chance to talk about my work.

• I talked about the process of redesigning Shopify’s developer documentation at the March 2020 Ottawa meetup of Write the Docs.
• I sat on a panel discussion on how to pitch business and financial writing hosted by PWAC Toronto on Thursday, May 23, 2013.
• I spoke on a panel of editors on Thursday, June 9, 2011, discussing what we look for from freelance writers.
• I made a presentation on “Geeky Tools for Busy Editors” for an event hosted by Canadian Society of Magazine Editors on May 5, 2011.
• For MagNet 2010, I made a presentation on recommended reading for web editors with Megan McChesney.

Friends

Wonderful people I know who have websites, in no particular order:

• Anne Thériault
• Caitlin Smith
• D.B. Scott
• Susan Bond
• Tiffany Conroy
• Alison Garwood-Jones
• Zoe Cormier
• Navneet Alang