Vincent RodriguezDesigner

Context

I worked with StackBlitz for the first two years of my freelance practice. My role was to take some of the workload off the in-house designers.

Challenge

Their identity was ageing, and they had to convince two opposing audiences. Developers, who are wary of anything that looks corporate, but also companies, who need to see a serious product before they sign. The gap was widening between what the product could do (which was technically remarkable) and how it presented itself.

The real problem wasn't aesthetic. StackBlitz sells something no one can see: a full development environment that runs in a browser tab. The entire job was to give that a shape.

Approach

I designed and built a series of landing pages, handling both the design and the front end.

The answer was to show the product in context. Every argument is embodied by a concrete moment from a team's day-to-day: a ticket with its repro link, a pull request under review. Icons of the tools those teams already use orbit around them, to say that StackBlitz fits into what already exists instead of replacing it.

For the landing page and blog illustrations, two classic pitfalls had to be avoided. Too literal, and you fall back on UI screenshots that tell you nothing. Too abstract, and you land in the generic tech imagery already seen everywhere. That language ended up spilling beyond the pages it was made for and defining how the brand looked.

Outcome

After two years of collaboration, Eric Simons, CEO and founder of StackBlitz, chose to entrust me with a promising R&D project that became Bolt.new, which I cover here.