Saladbowl

Designing a Purpose-built business platform

Overview

SaladBowl started as a personal initiative to address a major gap in the market—a platform built specifically for small businesses, creatives, and freelancers who needed streamlined tools to manage clients, projects, tasks, and invoicing without the complexity or cost of bloated enterprise solutions.

This wasn’t just a design task—it was an end-to-end product creation: Combining strategy, UX, UI, and development.

My role

Owner, Designer, Developer

Platform

Web & Mobile

Year

2020 - 2024

Open MacBook Pro displaying a screen titled 'Security & Permissions' with a list of permissions and checkboxes.

Smartphone displaying a project management app with sections for contacts, accounts, documents, sales, and financial data, against a black background.

Designing for Speed and Real Use

The visual language of SaladBowl was deliberately minimalist—task-first, distraction-free, and highly scannable. Every interaction, from adding a client to sending an invoice, was optimized to happen in under two clicks. I focused heavily on reducing cognitive load through clean layouts, intuitive icons, and consistent interaction patterns that helped users onboard quickly and stay focused daily.

Open MacBook Pro displaying a project invoice with expense details, totaling $143.75, on a black background.

Nimble as its Users

At its core, SaladBowl succeeded because it respected the time and pace of its users. Every screen, interaction, and layout was built around the reality of small business operations—lean, fast, and flexible. The result was a product that felt like it was built for them, because it was.

A MacBook Pro laptop displaying a digital dashboard interface with various charts and data metrics against a black background.

Feature Rich without Gatekeeping

Unlike many other project management tools that restrict meaningful features behind high-tier plans, SaladBowl delivered value up front. Whether you're a solo freelancer or a team of five, access to tools for contact management, invoicing, project oversight, team tasking, and even client notes—no upsell needed.

As teams evolve, SaladBowl flexed with them. I actively redesigned and restructured parts of the platform based on real use cases: supporting team-based permissions, group task visibility, and flexible workflows that adapt as responsibilities scale. The result is a tool that feels as effective on day one as it does on day one-hundred.

A MacBook Pro displaying a customer relationship management (CRM) software dashboard with contact information, project details, and document links, set against a black background.