Creative Engineer & Digital Artist · Brooklyn, NY

Hi, I'mRiven Beckford.

I design and build beautiful digital experiences.

About

Design and code, kept in the same head.

I'm a creative engineer who lives at the seam between design and code. For the past decade I've built interfaces, immersive 3D worlds, and design systems for products people actually use every day.

I care about the small stuff: the weight of a hover, the timing of a reveal, the millisecond a page feels alive. My work has shipped to millions and picked up a few awards along the way, but the part I love is quieter — making software feel like it was made by hand.

Years Experience

Projects Shipped

Happy Clients

Technologies

Capabilities

A full stack, end to end.

From the shader to the CI pipeline, I'm comfortable owning the whole surface of a product.

Frontend

React, Next.js, and TypeScript at production scale.

React 19
Next.js
TypeScript
Tailwind
Framer Motion

Backend

APIs and services that stay fast under real load.

Node.js
Go
PostgreSQL
Redis
GraphQL

UI / UX

Systems, prototypes, and interaction design.

Figma
Design Systems
Prototyping
Motion
Research

3D / WebGL

Immersive scenes with Three.js and shaders.

Three.js
R3F
GLSL
Blender
Drei

Cloud

Infra, edge deploys, and observability.

AWS
Vercel
Docker
Terraform
Cloudflare

AI

LLM tooling and generative experiences.

OpenAI
LangChain
RAG
Embeddings
Agents

Selected Work

Things I've built lately.

Web · 2025

Helio OS

A browser-based operating system for creative teams. Real-time collaboration, a windowing engine, and a plugin marketplace built on the edge.

Next.js
WebSockets
Zustand
Rust/WASM

Code Live demo

3D · 2024

Nebula Lab

An interactive galaxy explorer rendered entirely in WebGL. 50k instanced stars, custom shaders, and buttery navigation on mobile.

Three.js
GLSL
R3F
Drei

Code Live demo

AI · 2024

Cadence

A songwriting copilot that turns a hummed melody into a full arrangement. Streaming inference with a generative audio pipeline.

Python
PyTorch
Next.js
WebAudio

Code Live demo

Mobile · 2023

Tidepool

A journaling app that maps your mood to the ocean. Native gestures, offline-first sync, and a haptics engine that feels alive.

React Native
Expo
SQLite
Reanimated

Code Live demo

Web · 2023

Warehouse

Headless commerce infrastructure for indie brands. Sub-100ms product pages and a visual page builder used by 400+ stores.

Remix
PostgreSQL
Stripe
Redis

Code Live demo

AI · 2022

Prism

A design-to-code engine. Paste a screenshot, get accessible React components with tokens matched to your system.

Next.js
OpenAI
AST
Tailwind

Code Live demo

Journey

A decade of shipping.

Principal Creative Engineer

2023 — Present

Aether Studio

Lead the interactive team building award-winning product sites and 3D brand experiences for global clients.

Grew the practice from 2 to 11 engineers
3× FWA Site of the Day

Senior Frontend Engineer

2020 — 2023

Lumen Health

Owned the patient-facing design system and rebuilt the onboarding flow, lifting activation by 34%.

Shipped a 60-component library
Cut bundle size by 41%

Product Engineer

2018 — 2020

Fathom

Early engineer on an analytics platform. Built the real-time dashboard and the query editor from scratch.

First 10k users
Designed the charting engine

Freelance Developer

2015 — 2018

Independent

Designed and built sites for musicians, galleries, and startups. Learned to ship end-to-end, fast.

40+ launched sites
Found my love for motion

Kind Words

What collaborators say.

Riven has the rarest combination: a designer's eye and an engineer's rigor. The site he built for us still gets compliments two years later.
DO
Dara Okonkwo
VP Product, Aether

Writing