.jpg)
A few years back, I was at TunnelBear, where my job was basically animating bears all day. A very aloof, kind of silly-looking bear, on top of a seriously private VPN that people actually trusted with their traffic. Nobody signed up for TunnelBear because of the bear. But the bear is the reason people actually enjoyed using it, told their friends about it, remembered it existed. That stuck with me.
Blacksmith is a strange place for that lesson to land. We run infrastructure that offers fast, managed CI at scale. Our customers are engineers who care about how fast they can validate and merge code. While our product is serious, we have the confidence to not take ourselves too seriously. Our loud yellow branding, and the delightful touches we add to our products, are an expression of that confidence. So when it came to designing a character for our new cloud coding agent [code]smith, I felt like we had a lot of room to play with some fun and slightly silly ideas. I knew the character would be more than just decoration and that the experience around it would be built on a solid foundation. While no one would forgive a slow product because it has a cute mascot, a fast and well-engineered one, with a weird little character inside it, that sounds pretty delightful.
From the start, I thought it would be fitting to take inspiration from the pixelated look of our word mark and explore things in the 1-bit world. But aside from the pixels, what would our agent actually look like? What form would it take? We wanted a character that was thematic and friendly, but that would also lend itself well to animation, specifically "thinking" and "working" animations, like you'd expect from a coding agent. So with each character, we also explored how it might move and express itself in different poses.
Some of the ideas we tried out:
But the little hammer kinda looked like a picket sign. The blacksmith dude made it feel like there's only one kind of person who swings a hammer. And the little clanker robot, like the others, just didn't scale well.
We didn't decide based on debating static mockups, we built out a few of the characters and watched them actually move within the app. The one that worked the best became our winner: an anvil-headed robot shaped like our brand icon, basically a clanker without a body. But a head is just a head. Did it need a body? We decided to skip that problem entirely and just add hands and props whenever the moment called for it. That kept things flexible, and as a bonus, it helped the character scale nicely at any size.
We didn't launch every animation on day one either. A small finished set beats a big half-done one, so we kept it small at first and only shipped what actually felt good. We still come back to this character to add new animations whenever inspiration strikes. Polish was never a "ship it and forget it" thing for us, it's ongoing.
Once we had a face, I got curious about what else it could do.
One thing I love is discovering new things the longer I use a product, kinda like getting little gifts as you go. I wanted [code]smith to have some of that feeling, so we created a whole load of thinking and working animations that load randomly as you chat. Turns out, once you create that many versions of one character, you end up asking some real questions about their personality. Like maybe they love a good doom scroll. Maybe they love coffee and cigarettes. Maybe they can think so hard their head spontaneously combusts.
The anvil lives in a pixel grid, but that ended up feeling a bit too constrained, so the animation isn't quite classical pixel style, the anvil can still rotate and move freely. Essentially the rule is: if it's fun, it's ok. Same with the props and elements around the character, in some cases elements can break the pixel grid mold, like our little riff on the A Beautiful Mind meme. Sometimes you gotta forget the pixel rules a bit to keep things weird and fun.
It's great working with a team that really cares about craft. It's not just the landing page and the hero animation. It's the animated status icons that may have gone unnoticed. It's our anvil character in a heroic debug button that you might only see on occasion. Those are the places a lot of teams may overlook, and exactly where people can feel whether a product was made by people paying attention. Our little character doesn't just stay confined in the chat window, we love finding ways to integrate it across the app, to make the experience feel like more than the sum of its parts. The combination of craft and delight with high performance engineering, are what make Blacksmith products feel like Blacksmith.
We have big ambitions for design and product at Blacksmith. We want to bring high levels of polish and delight into everything we do here. If you're the kind of person who thinks a state deserves as much care as the core feature, or who'd rather prototype four versions of an idea (with an unlimited token budget) than argue about it in a doc, we'd like to talk to you. We're hiring designers who want to build things this fun, this delightful, and this thoughtfully made. Get in touch.
In the meantime, keep an eye out. [code]smith is currently loose in New York City. If you're in town, don't be surprised if you run into a weird little anvil on your morning commute.