Work | Adam Stoddard

2023 - now

Steady

I was hired at then Status Hero to help transform a tactical check-in tool into a comprehensive solution for solving complex team coordination challenges. A complete overhaul of… everything later, Steady was born.

role: product strategy, product design, branding, front-end development

Of all the logo options I explored, this simple typographic treatment with an underline felt best. Simple, sturdy, steady.
Steady is mostly about reading and writing, so I re-designed the app to make those tasks feel great. Open canvases, minimal distractions, and a linear feed to for efficient reading.
I spend most of my time working on product, which is to say, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to help teams work together better. A byproduct of that is Continuous Coordination, an approach I co-developed with Henry Poydar.
Steady’s website is a great example of my favorite way to work. Copywriting, design, and development all happen together in a single flow.
A focus of my product work has been developing an AI strategy for Steady, and designing features like Echoes that use AI to solve real problems.

2022 - 2023

QA Wolf

QA Wolf is a novel approach to software testing that’s part people, part platform. The challenge; flesh out the product in order to seamlessly blend the two, and solve some longstanding pain points for customer and QA engineers alike.

role: product strategy, product design, branding

The QA Wolf test editor interface. I introduced a novel ‘living test matrix’ approach that solved longstanding tension between rapidly out-of-date static text matrixes and actual test code.
I spent most of my time at QA Wolf working on product, but I snuck some brand work in there too. Highlight; drawing derpy wolves.
An ‘open kitchen’ approach makes it easy for customers to see what’s happening, and critically, trust the test code.
A complete bug reporting system puts everything you need to fix a bug in one place.
A new run classification system let’s customers know exactly where every test stands.

2021 - 2022

Netlify

My time at Netlify was split between day-to-day marketing design, and going deep on design explorations for a comprehensive rebrand. These are highlights from my favorite direction, which was technical-but-fun, web-forward, and distinctive.

role: brand strategy, marketing design, copywriting

Netlify is all about connecting the composable web, and this landing page concept directly demonstrated their approach through an interactive node map.
The visual language revolved around the simplest expression of a connection; the humble line. The only rule; straight lines only.
Since this direction was expressly designed to be web-first, I built a complete stylescape website to show it off in its native medium.
My work has a strong pragmatic streak. In this case, that took the shape of developing tools like dither shaders in Blender that could quickly turn anything into a series of (on brand) lines.

2020 - 2021

Hey

Technically still a Basecamp / 37s project, Hey was a re-imagining of what an email app could/should be. My job; design a brand identity for email that felt as refreshing as the product itself, and bring it to life on the web and in the app.

role: brand strategy, marketing design, front-end development, copywriting

I didn’t want the hand mark to feel constructed, so I drew a few hundred 3-second sketches of a waving hand and picked the one with the perfect shape and feel.
I owned the website from top to bottom. Minimal layouts juxtaposed against colorful organic shapes + the occasional hand doodle kept things light and fresh.
A major marketing push for Hey was the ‘Hey Email Research Lab’ AKA H.E.R.L., which was a venue for oddball email-centric experiments. I designed the identity, the website, and the merch.
I designed the H.E.R.L. website around a fictitious, woefully outdated OS call hOS (Hey Operating System). Building a pixel interface to control an autonomous vehicle via email wasn’t on my bingo card, but life is a highway.
A sticker sheet for the first experiment, in which you could send an email and watch it get printed and deposited into an actual dumpster fire.

2016 - 2020

Basecamp

My role at Basecamp is best described as an internal agency of one. This was a wide ranging role, covering a major rebrand, owning basecamp.com top to bottom, running conversion experiments, designing merch, building a multi-format self-publishing system, and designing & building a range of websites; storefronts, blogs, docs sites, etc.

role: brand strategy, marketing design, front-end development, copywriting

The updated mark pays homage to what came before and what Basecamp does by transforming the iconic mountain range into a paperclip shape. Basecamp keeps your stuff together.
My work on basecamp.com took two paths; expressing Basecamp’s value proposition in a clear and direct way, and building a fast, lightweight, best-in-class marketing presence.
The Basecamp brand and website were just the tip of the iceberg. I worked on branding, design, and dev for allll of the sub-brands and open source projects too.
People mostly listen to new episodes on their phone, so I focused this REWORK.fm refresh around exploring the back-catalog. A persistent player let you listen and browse simultaneously.
Most of my work here was digital, punctuated by real-world projects like lettering & layout work for ‘It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work’.
The final incarnation of Signal v. Noise, Basecamp’s blog. An interesting challenge was making the design work as well for a 10,000 word essay as a 20 word post.

2011 - 2016

You Need A Budget

I joined YNAB as the founding designer when it was still an offline, 100% manual Adobe Flex app. I led the charge to re-imagine YNAB as a web app, and introduced key features that helped YNAB grow from niche product to the budgeting app.

role: product strategy, product design, branding, front-end development

Earlier versions of YNAB were set up like a spreadsheet, which invited people to project money they didn’t have. I redesigned the app around a single month view with category tools like goals that let you plan for the future without budgeting money you don’t have.
Budgeting carries a bunch of negative emotions for folks, so I wanted to make sure using YNAB didn’t add fuel to the fire. To that end, the brand keeps things light and fun.
I spent a lot of time sweating workflow details that made transaction work minimal, and fast. The goal was always to make it easy for people to stick with budgeting by eliminating friction and tedious low-value work.

2002 - 2011

The agency years

Before I started working in tech, I honed my chops at agencies and running my own studio. Mostly building brands, websites, and apps. Documenting all the work from this time period sounds exhausting so… imagine a bunch of cool work here.

this one is very compelling
so design forward
award-winner right here
truly avant-garde
you’re impressed at this point