Ryan Burney, Developer in Denver, CO, United States
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Ryan Burney

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Web UI Developer

Denver, CO, United States

Toptal member since February 15, 2018

Bio

Ryan is a self-taught designer and front-end developer with over two decades of experience. He specializes in web app design and custom WordPress development. He coded his first website in 1996, then spent eight years as co-founder of a small digital agency, where he worked with dozens of clients on over 50 websites and countless design projects. Ryan is an excellent, timely communicator who enjoys learning, problem-solving, and delivering a delightful user experience.

Portfolio

Strake
Figma, Adobe CC, Web UX, Web App UI, Complex Application User Interfaces (UI)...
Modus Persona
CSS, HTML, WordPress, Adobe Photoshop, Vue, Figma, JavaScript...
GoSpotCheck
WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP, Front-end Development, APIs, Webflow, Design Systems...

Experience

  • Web UI - 20 years
  • Layout Design - 15 years
  • Visual Design - 15 years
  • WordPress - 15 years
  • Adobe CC - 8 years
  • Web App UX - 5 years
  • Figma - 5 years
  • Web App UI - 5 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

GitHub, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), MacOS, Figma, Adobe CC, HubSpot, WordPress

The most amazing...

...project I designed was a custom poker set: chips in 5 denominations, 2 decks of playing cards, a dealer button, 4 challenge coin designs, and a felt table top.

Work Experience

UI/UX Designer

2022 - PRESENT
Strake
  • Designed over 50 individual screens for our beta web app using Figma and industry best practices. Incorporated feedback from a dozen design partners to iterate on the most critical parts of our product.
  • Sourced talent for and project managed a large icon design project for 100+ AWS services icons.
  • Designed and developed HTML emails, assisted with logo design, and created custom GitHub banners, Google Workspace product icons, and Product Hunt gallery images for an upcoming product launch.
Technologies: Figma, Adobe CC, Web UX, Web App UI, Complex Application User Interfaces (UI), UI Design, Web App UX, UX Design, Web UI, HubSpot, Editorial Design, Design Systems, Visual Design, Agile Sprints

Creative Technologist

2019 - 2022
Modus Persona
  • Provided digital and marketing support for our small team, primarily focused on updating client sites to WordPress and streamlining marketing operations.
  • Built and maintained an internal company dashboard that connects to various APIs to consolidate marketing reporting.
  • Helped develop a proprietary API for expanding the client's ability to sell products and services.
Technologies: CSS, HTML, WordPress, Adobe Photoshop, Vue, Figma, JavaScript, Front-end Development, APIs, Web UI, Web UX, Visual Design

Lead UI Designer

2015 - 2019
GoSpotCheck
  • Designed and coded updates for the primary, customer-facing website at GoSpotCheck.com and the internal, employee-facing websites, all of which are built on the WordPress platform.
  • Created an email builder form that allows marketing team members to generate and download HTML emails. This reduces delivery time and ensures each email has already undergone the necessary quality assurance.
  • Sketched, wireframed, prototyped, and designed mobile interfaces for a new image-recognition app.
  • Created an integration with WordPress that displays current customer data on a password-protected web page using the Salesforce API.
  • Automated site deployments with DeployBot, WP Engine, and Slack to reduce the number of bugs released to production.
Technologies: WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP, Front-end Development, APIs, Webflow, Design Systems, Web UX, Web UI, Web App UI, Web App UX, HubSpot, Figma, Adobe CC

Front-end Developer

2013 - 2014
Faction Media
  • Built a custom event calendar in JavaScript for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA) and integrated it with the Sitefinity content management system.
  • Developed a responsive version of DCPA's website to ensure maximum usability for the organization's growing mobile-first population.
  • Created and managed Faction Media's customer-facing website at FactionMedia.com.
  • Constructed a custom, JavaScript-powered mobile web applet for Vail's Epic Pass, which allowed users to compare and purchase season ski passes.
Technologies: WordPress, jQuery, CSS, HTML, PHP, Web App UX

Co-Founder

2007 - 2014
3 Roads Media
  • Designed the packaging and managed the print production for three private label food brands sold in Asian and South American markets.
  • Grew the business from zero revenue to six figures within five years and maintained year-over-year growth for five of the business' seven years of operation.
  • Hired and mentored two employees, one contractor and one intern.
  • Managed, designed, or coded over 50 websites that were primarily built on the WordPress platform.
  • Created the branding and built a new tourism website for the City of Blackhawk, Colorado, to increase the city's brand awareness and drive in new visitors.
  • Coordinated a casting call and photoshoot at a private country club for a golf apparel company.
  • Built a social networking site on the ExpressionEngine platform that gave its users a score based on how "normally" they answered the given questions.
Technologies: jQuery, CSS, HTML, PHP, Adobe CC, Web UI Design, Web UX Design, Web App Development, Web Development, Visual Design, Editorial Design, Web Project Management, Food Packaging, Layout Design, WordPress, Graphic Design

Custom WordPress Pricing Calculator for an Online Printing Company

https://www.dazzleprinting.com/online-printing/book-printing/
I created a custom pricing calculator app in Vue.js and PHP that integrates with WordPress' REST API to pull custom pricing data from the WordPress back end. Pricing data is fully editable via custom fields in the WordPress admin, so the client can easily update pricing data for any of its myriad printing products and services. This pricing data appears on the client's website as a multi-field form, where customers can select things like quantity, number of pages, type of binding coating, shipping speed, and more. Pricing is dynamically and instantly calculated and updated based on a customer's selections.

The client has said that these custom calculators have been invaluable to the business and have solved the old problems of not having visibility into pricing, having to engage a developer to make simple pricing changes, and not providing customers with an intuitive form for building custom print orders.

The calculators also integrate with WooCommerce and validate user input on both the client and server sides to prevent price manipulation.

Custom Vue.js Web App for Searching and Saving Cocktail Recipes

https://findyournextdrink.com/
In my spare time, I enjoy working on Vue.js projects. My most recent project is a recipe discovery app for quickly and easily finding cocktails. It solves a problem that I repeatedly encountered at home: deciding what drinks I could make with the limited ingredients I had on hand.

This app allows you to search by multiple ingredients, names, sources, tags, and more. You can save drinks to a list of favorites and keep track of when you last made them.

This Vue.js app integrates with Algolia for blazing fast search, Firebase for data storage, and Firebase Hosting.

Custom Website Design and Build

https://moduspersona.com
A completely custom WordPress theme for our agency's updated website. I was the lead designer and sole developer on this project. Charged with creating a compelling visual design that complemented the copy to tell our agency's story.

Salesforce API Request for an Access Token

The attached PHP script uses cURL to fetch an access token from the Salesforce token request endpoint. Obtaining an access token is a prerequisite for making calls to the Salesforce API; this script should, therefore, be included in other scripts that make calls to the Salesforce API.

The script cannot be run independently; one would need to set up an application within Salesforce and capture a client secret and client ID. A Salesforce account is also required; however, I feel this is a good example of a typical PHP script that I would write in my day-to-day job and is representative of my work.
2004 - 2007

Master's Degree in Business Administration

University of Denver - Denver, Colorado, USA

2000 - 2004

Bachelor's Degree in Business

University of Colorado - Boulder, Colorado, USA

JANUARY 2023 - PRESENT

AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials

Amazon Web Services

Libraries/APIs

Vue, jQuery, WordPress API, Firebase Web SDK

Tools

Figma, Adobe Photoshop, GitHub, Adobe CC, Vue CLI

Languages

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP

Platforms

WordPress, WordPress Theme Design, WooCommerce, HubSpot, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), MacOS, Algolia, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Webflow

Paradigms

Web App Design, UI Design, Visual Design, Web UI Design, Web UX Design, UX Design

Storage

JSON

Other

Layout Design, APIs, Front-end Development, Web UX, Web App UI, Complex Application User Interfaces (UI), Web UI, Editorial Design, Web Development, Web Project Management, Graphic Design, Firebase Hosting, B2C Marketing, Web App UX, Design Systems, Agile Sprints, Web App Development, Food Packaging, App Customizations

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