I work in the overlap between design and code.

I’m Ryan. I’ve spent more than twenty years designing and building digital products, and I’m still doing it. Most of that time has been spent with a group of people around a table: strategy, content, information architecture, UX, design, search, and the engineers who have to make it all actually work. I help them agree on what to build, and then I help build it.

I came at this from a few directions. I started as a designer, spent years as a developer, then a stretch as a producer. None of it was planned, but it left me able to sit in any of those chairs and know roughly what the person in it is worried about. That is most of what I bring: I can hold the strategy, the story, and the technical cost of a thing in my head at the same time, and tell you where they disagree.

I’ve worked with Adobe, Cloudflare, Verizon, and Pluralsight, among others, usually on the same sort of problem: the strategy says one thing, the interface says another, and the code says a third. Lately I’ve been helping pull several brands onto one platform, in a handful of languages and markets, so it reads as one company instead of four.

I have a BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Utah, and I’ve written code in Python, C#, PHP, JavaScript, and HTML and CSS. When I’m away from a screen I build bobber motorcycles in the garage, which is slower work and teaches the same lessons.