Zach Crandell

Washington, DC crandell.io @zdcjpg

CREATIVE DIRECTOR • DIGITAL STRATEGIST • SELF-TAUGHT FULL-STACK BUILDER

No degree. Built and led creative teams that 3×'d impressions and turned Members of Congress into voluntary reposters. Also code my own tools in PHP/Laravel, MySQL, JavaScript, and Tailwind when the off-the-shelf options are garbage.

Experience

Social Media Director (first in role)

SBA Pro-Life America – Washington, DC

Jul 2023 – Present | 2+ years and counting

Redesigned the entire visual system (press releases, research, blog) → dozens of sitting Members of Congress started reposting SBA assets because they finally looked sharp on their own feeds.
Engagement +150% YoY, channels 0 → 1M+ impressions/month.

Creative Director (inaugural) → transitioned to full-time in-house builds

Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) – Washington, DC

May 2015 – Oct 2021 | 6.5 years total

Launched CPAC's first in-house creative department; brand system, team, 1,000+ assets per cycle.
Pioneered live-stream tools with Twitter Gov → #CPAC impressions 164 M → 500 M (200% YoY growth).

SELECTED SELF-TAUGHT CODING PROJECTS (because tools should work for me, not the other way around)

Built a custom link-in-bio from scratch (PHP/Laravel + MySQL + Tailwind) when Linktree felt too limited → 30% higher click-through vs the generic version.
Multiple internal dashboards and mini-apps in Laravel + Blade + MySQL for tracking performance, managing assets, and automating repetitive tasks.

Comfortable shipping production code: PHP 8, Laravel, MySQL/MariaDB, JavaScript (vanilla + Alpine), HTML/CSS, Tailwind, Vite, basic API integrations.

CORE TOOLS & SUPERPOWERS

Figma Adobe Suite After Effects PHP/Laravel MySQL JavaScript Tailwind X power user Paid media Brand systems Merch production Dev handoff (I literally speak dev)