Thrad

Thrad is an early-stage London AdTech startup building an AI-native advertising platform. I joined as the founding design engineer at a point where the product was serving early enterprise customers but needed a cohesive design language to grow with the business. Over four months I took full ownership of the frontend — designing and building simultaneously across every surface of the product.

Founding Design Engineer. I was the sole design voice and owned frontend implementation end to end. No handoff — I moved between Figma and code depending on what was faster. I worked closely with Marco, the CTO, and the backend team in both directions: sometimes designing around features they proposed, sometimes prototyping ideas in code first and having the backend built around them.

I also contributed beyond the product itself — pitch deck design, ad format concepts, and marketing materials for enterprise customers.

When I joined there was a lot of disarray. Components had drifted, colours were inconsistent — orange appearing in different shades across different pages, icons styled differently in each context. There was no single source of truth.

My first task was to understand what we actually had before I could work out what to fix. I spent the early weeks in Figma consolidating everything: pulling every component onto one page, mapping the colour tokens, understanding what was reusable and what needed rebuilding from scratch.

The biggest surface I worked on was the campaign creation flow. My first instinct was to work with what existed, but the more I studied it the more I realised the structure needed rethinking. I looked at how other ad platforms handled complex creation flows — Meta Ads, Reddit Ads, Snapchat — specifically how they kept the user oriented while filling in a lot of information.

Reddit's approach stood out: form on one side, live preview on the other. You write your copy and see the ad update in real time. I brought that pattern to Thrad — prompt input and product fields on the left, live ad preview on the right. Each product you add generates its own campaign preview. Marco's reaction when he saw it was the moment I knew it worked.

Beyond the campaign builder, the wider work was about consistency. I rebuilt the design system so that moving through Thrad felt like one product — repeatable components, a unified type scale, a colour system that held across every page. I also designed and built the geography and audience pages with Mapbox integration, the analytics views with new chart types I hadn't worked with before, empty states, the pixel integration manager for advertiser tracking, and an AI campaign assistant called Needle — though that one was pulled back down while the backend caught up to the vision.

Over time I shifted from designing everything in Figma first to iterating directly in code. Claude became a genuine second brain — I'd prototype ideas fast, see what worked, and build on it. By the end I was moving significantly faster than I ever could have in Figma alone.

A fully redesigned frontend delivered across four months — design and implementation by the same person. Consistent components across every page. A campaign builder modelled on the best patterns in the industry. Geography, audience, analytics, and tracking surfaces all rebuilt.

A product that now gets shown in investor presentations and customer demos, at a stage where the company is actively raising its next round.