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Brandon Durham, Web Developer/Designer

18+ years experience

1 About me

My name is Brandon Durham. I’ve been a Software Engineer and Designer professionally for more than 18 years. My primary focus has always been front-end development with a strong interest in its relationship to design — particularly typography. I’m a developer first, a designer second, and love the intersection of the two.

I’ve worked my fair share of jobs for the paycheck. I almost always enjoy the work itself and have been able to convince myself that I’m fulfilled. But that has become more and more difficult to do as time goes by. It’s time for a change.

When I think about the organizations I would most love to dedicate my time and capabilities to—organizations that would allow me to do what I love while supporting a product I believe in—Le Puzz is an undeniable contendor.

When Covid hit I began ordering puzzles obsessively. I noticed that almost across the board the quality was very, very poor, regardless of what the manufacturer promised or charged. I started to actively seek out companies that treated their products with more respect. I found Le Puzz pretty quickly and connected immediately with the style and humor. When my first of many orders arrived it was clear that yours is one of the very few companies that truly delivers on your promise.

I have a job. By nearly all measures you could say it’s good one. But at the end of the day I’m really just helping someone make money when more than anything I want to be proud of the work I do and the product it supports.

So, in an effort to be proactive and try to make that happen I’ve decide to court my dream organizations, the first of which is Le Puzz!

You might be wondering what kind of work I’ve done in the past, or what I might be able to do for you. If so, read on!

2 Examples of my work

Here are just a few examples of my work on the web. More examples and greater detail around the duties performed here can be supplied by request.

  1. A Memoir Project. My partner at the time had been considering writing a memoir for years but was feeling stuck, and the idea of shopping his work around made the task feel all the more daunting. I came up with the idea of releasing his memoir as an online serial, with one chapter being published every two weeks. The site garnered several awards for design and creativity and had several thousand visitors per week. I handled all design as well as front- and back-end development.
  2. Hoefler&Co. In 2012 I threw caution to the wind and applied for a position with my design heroes of many years, Hoefler&Co (né Hoefler & Frere-Jones). I spent eight of the best professional years of my life working on wildly progressive and creative projects and launched some of the best work I’ve ever been a part of, the biggest being the redesign of the company site. Other notable projects included a custom browser-based type-testing tool called Try.typography; a graphic-design-heavy type showcase called Discover.typography; and one of the world’s biggest subscription services for boutique webfonts, Cloud.typography (now part of Monotype).
  3. Baltimore Brew. Created in partnership with Post Typography who designed the site, I built a full CMS with an API layer for the front-end to communicate with via a RESTful interface. The CMS included several custom user permissions levels managed by the CEO, allowing reporters to manage their content and only their content. I also handled all front-end development, which included ensuring the site was fully-responsive and rendered correctly and efficiently on any device.
  4. Best Horror Scenes. One of my first loves in life was for Horror films and television. This project is my ongoing love letter of the genre and its better entries (subjectively speaking, of course). I handled all design as well as front- and back-end development.
  5. Palaxy Tracks. My first real creative outlet was music. After years of playing in other peoples’ bands I created my own. Palaxy Tracks was active from 1997 to 2017, releasing a total of 7 albums. This site acts as a compendium for these releases. I handled all design as well as front- and back-end development.

3 What Can I Do For Le Puzz?

I’ve handled many different roles over the years. While with Fringe (2020–2023) I acted primarily as Lead Engineer managing a small team of developers, but also took on an interim role as Design Director and managed a team of three. With Hoefler&Co (2012–2020) I acted as a Full-stack Developer, a Designer, and managed several other developers during this time. I also designed and developed a proprietary CRM that is still in use to this day. While working with Adlucent (2008–2012) I acted as the sole Senior Front-end Developer; Lead Designer; and managed all of my own projects. I tackled a wide array of projects there, including redesigning and developing the company site; designing t-shirts and conference materials; and building many landing pages for clients that included Multivariate and A/B tests.

All this to say I bring a good bit of experience to the table. I would love the opportunity to help manage anything web-related for Le Puzz.

I’m at home with my head in the details. I consider work an ongoing education and thrive on learning new and better ways to achieve my goal: creating a positive user experience with semantic, concise, and meaningful code with a healthy dose of surprise and delight thrown in. Depending on the audience, that can call for a relatively traditional and accessible interface, or something more experimental and unexpected.

My ultimate goal is to obtain a full-time position, but I would be more than happy to consider a consultant or contract position that is meaningful to the work of Le Puzz.

4 Curious?

Need more? In 2023 Jonathan Hoefler wrote the following about me and my time as Senior Software Engineer/Designer at his company, Hoefler&Co:

“Brandon’s an outstandingly talented developer, a thoughtful and constructive collaborator, ten times the designer that he thinks he is, and just one of my favorite people. I count myself immensely fortunate that his sensitivity to typography brought him to Hoefler&Co where I had the pleasure of working with him for eight of my company’s most energetic years, and I’m happy to call him a friend.

Over these years, Brandon was instrumental in the design and development of not only typography.com, which underwent both evolutionary and revolutionary changes, but also the award-winning and influential Discover.typography, which raised the bar for typography in the browser. Brandon took the reins of our saas product Cloud.typography, and was an absolutely critical part of my team that was charged with creating an elegant front-end to conceal the massively complex set of decisions required of a sophisticated font library. Behind the scenes, Brandon dealt smartly and confidently with the demanding back-end integrations of two different content management systems, a best-of-breed CDN, and a sophisticated internal CRM that he designed while tackling the public-facing websites at the same time. I was always grateful for not only Brandon’s talents and energies but his ideas and opinions, his honesty, his good humor, his eagerness to simultaneously explore new technologies while committing to time-tested ones, his patience with the limited resources of an established company (bootstrapped, profitable, old-school), and his camaraderie with a diverse group of colleagues. I know him to have been both a generous collaborator and a good friend to the many designers, developers, engineers, managers, and typeface designers he worked with at H&Co, and I’d recommend him without hesitation to absolutely anyone with the good fortune to be considering him for a project.”

— Jonathan Hoefler

If desired I can share Jonathan’s contact information for a referral along with a few other colleagues, managers, agencies, and clients I’ve worked with.