Finance is not boring. We might be a little biased, but we also have the receipts. Ask the team that turned Financial Awareness Day into an excuse to make gothic band merch.
We wanted to share just how ✨ fun ✨ we can be with the world. And so ramp.design was born. A place to show off the creativity on our design team: what we're making and what we're learning. It wasn't easy. Imagine working on your portfolio, except it needs to represent 40 people at once. Where would you even begin?
We started by brain dumping all our hopes and dreams in one place, with no constraints. Before long, people were making little mood boards inside FigJam. If you take a look, you’ll notice that the vibes are all over the place.
When our creative director Paul saw the chaos in FigJam, he challenged us to design an experience where all this “madness” was welcome. Instead of limiting the site to one aesthetic, what if each project could open into its own world?
To imagine these worlds, we started with three questions:
- How does the experience begin?
- What will people discover as they start poking around?
- How do we encourage people to dive deeper?
The team came back with prototypes that each opened a different door into ramp.design. Bao explored what it might feel like to enter another universe. He built islands, rendered mountains, transformed receipts into landscapes, and used our mood boards to imagine wildly different journeys through the site.
Nicholas imagined the site as one endless receipt, with more of the team’s work appearing as you scroll.
Rikin explored unique ways of navigating the site from a bouncing ball to an isometric cube.
At this point, we had explored lots of “cool” things, but something was missing. The explorations were playful and inspiring, but some of them felt like they could belong to any creative studio or team. We needed to solve two main problems:
- How do we make the site feel unmistakably Ramp?
- How do we give every person on the team a world of their own?
What’s more unmistakably Ramp than the Ramp card? We built an editor that allows every designer to customize their card with stickers and doodles. The card gave us a shared visual language without asking the team to work within one design system.
The cards were wildly different and became the entry point for people visiting our little home on the internet.
I always tell my students that a portfolio is never truly finished. ramp.design won’t be either. It’s a living home for our team, one we’ll keep adding to, rethinking, and probably breaking from time to time. As our work and our team evolve, the site will evolve with us ❤️