How we reimagined our nerdy workplace
Designing an office in a remote world
Two-and-a-half years have passed since we all walked out of our offices, expecting to work from home for a few weeks and then return to life as we knew it. Instead, work culture has changed and so have our office needs. NerdWallet has adopted a remote-first policy, which means our offices are no longer places where every employee sits at their desk every day. Instead, they’re spaces for Nerds to come together — when and if they choose — to have the quality time and collaboration that Zoom just can’t offer.
Recognizing this new way of working, we set out to design a space that would facilitate connection. Big conference rooms would be replaced with comfortable couches and armchairs. Assigned desks would be reimagined as portable workstations that give people the freedom and flexibility to move around. And hallways would be transformed to encourage on-the-fly conversations — like when you serendipitously run into someone you were just about to message on Slack!
But how could we do all of this and make it all feel ownably, uniquely nerdy? Follow along for how we made it happen.
Facilitating connection, the nerdy way
San Francisco is where we were founded, and it remains our HQ (even as we’ve added offices across the US and internationally). So, it was important that our space celebrated the Bay Area and honored how far we’ve come since those early days. We also wanted to showcase our company culture, with every detail speaking to the values that guide how we work together and define what it means to be a Nerd.
In short, we wanted people to feel comfortable and delighted the moment they stepped out of the elevator. And we wanted them to know and feel, without a doubt, that they were in a NerdWallet space.
Starting with a blank slate
To start, we got a feel for the space by doing a walkthrough (with a few of us following along over FaceTime, floorplan in hand). After that, we started to pair placements with ideas — though, of course, there were a few ideas without placements and placements without ideas.
In terms of must-haves, we knew we wanted to:
- Highlight our company values
- Incorporate design elements we were excited about, including neon and supergraphics
- Collaborate with local artists
- Celebrate our California roots
- Showcase our company history and milestones
Bringing our must-haves to life in the space
With those goals in mind, here are some of the parts of our space we’re most proud of.
Highlighting our company values
Our company values are embodied by six characters who star in a comic book called “Adventures in NerdWallet Culture.” Since these values define what it means to be a Nerd, we wanted to give them a prime location that employees and visitors would see when they enter our main floor. This cornerstone “Values Wall” leans into the nerdiness of these characters and tells the story as a comic, with each character/value getting their own panel. This wall was also a good place to experiment with different materials: we used a mix of vinyl, wheatpaste, and MDF board to give the characters dimensionality, texture, and edge.
Incorporating new design elements and textures
The team wanted to intentionally bring texture to the space in interesting ways, even beyond the Values Wall. Think: wood, glass, foliage, biophilia, and more. So, in one of our common areas, we partnered with Shawna Peterson of Peterson Neon on a custom piece to add light as one of our mediums. Of several design options our team developed, we rallied behind a type-driven graphic that boldly declares “Nerdy and Proud.” Shawna then used her expertise to navigate electrical needs and select materials, including a white matte acrylic (cleverly designed to hide fingerprints and electrical wires) and the right combination of chemicals to achieve our desired glow. They then custom bent each letter and attached each glass piece to the acrylic mount. Finally, it was hooked up to a dimmer, allowing us to calibrate the intensity to illuminate the adjacent sitting area.
Celebrating our California roots
Pulling inspiration from our organic interior design (hello, moss walls), we created a California biota mural — a playful and nerdy spin on the scientific posters you might find in a botanist’s office. The heft of this work was in the concepting phase, as we spent hours researching plants and insects that are native to the region. After picking a few to champion in the piece (California poppies and a banana slug, obviously), we selected the rest based on the complimentary colors and shapes that we could bring into our interior design. A sense of movement was created by the plants and insects popping out of the frame on a dark green background, making the scene come to life. And with a museum-like key, we encourage viewers to pause and discover the scientific names of each organism. We love how this piece celebrates one of the many possibilities of what it means to be nerdy.
Showcasing our company history
In 2021, we celebrated one of our biggest milestones yet: our IPO. But there were so many other important milestones before that. One of NerdWallet’s first major moments happened back in 2009 when Tim’s sister asked for help finding a credit card. He thought it’d be easy to find an answer, but it ended up taking days. And just like that, the idea for NerdWallet was born. Two years later, Tim moved from New York to California and hired the first Nerd. We have grown and glowed up quite a bit since then, so we wanted to showcase our history as we start this next chapter in our new nerdy home. Our timeline wall celebrates where we started and all of our Nerds’ hard work along the way.
Collaborating with local artists
As another way to celebrate our Bay Area roots, it was important for us to commission a local artist for at least one of our experiences. Earlier in the year, Oakland-based artist Jocelyn Tsaih spoke to our design team as part of our bimonthly speaker series, BrightMinds. She was our top choice to create a piece for the new office, and luckily, she was available!
To serve as inspiration and context for Jocelyn, we pulled together some design elements that feel inherent and ownable to the NerdWallet brand: our “dream beam” portals (a prominent feature in our 2021 campaign work) that illustrate the clarity NerdWallet affords its users, and our hand-drawn markups that speak to our nerdy expertise and research. From there, Jocelyn sketched a few concepts — and the one we chose was actually inspired by some of our team’s illustrations for this very blog! Together, the piece harmoniously combined our company’s values, growth, and progress via building blocks, alongside our ability to unlock consumers’ financial dreams. Jocelyn also took a collage-like approach, utilizing laser cut wood pieces and mirrored acrylic which created depth and optimism.
What we learned
Designing a brand new office in a remote-first world certainly came with some unique challenges. Here are a few things we’d tell ourselves if we could travel back in time:
- When you go in to scout any space, take pictures of every angle
- When you measure walls, don’t forget to measure all of the hardware so you can design around it
- Understand what kind of light the space gets. This will change how the colors will look.
- Everything is so much bigger than it looks on your screen. Comping your design into a photo of the space is key to get a sense of how it feels.
- Keep the interior design (furniture, paint colors, and fixtures) in mind as you design your experiences
- Try to create concepts that can scale into other spaces — office or otherwise
- Leave extra room in your schedule to get your palette just right. Remote color proofing is tough.
Having learned those lessons, we’re excited that we created a space for Nerds that’s now a refuge from cramped apartments, domestic distractions, and the physical isolation many felt while working alone in the pandemic. We’re thrilled by the Nerds’ response and hope the office continues to be a place where we can work, collaborate, celebrate and reconnect with each other IRL.
Thank you to all who contributed to our nerdy space. Fist bumps to the following people and organizations: Dakota Blakely, Amber Hiatt, Rob Nikzad, Robin Juan, Bailey Kology, Natalie Cowan, Natalie Garnett, Amy Wong, Ned Sweet, Jocelyn Tsaih, MMoser, One Hat One Hand, Shawna Peterson and team at Peterson Neon, Margaret Austin, Automatic Arts
Want to be part of a team that writes about stuff like this? Check out open roles in Design + User Experience at NerdWallet.
