I had the privilege of managing Jacob McAdam, and throughout our time working together, I watched him grow into an exceptional product designer. When he started, his focus was on visual design—where he already excelled—but he quickly expanded his skill set to tackle more complex user problems with strategic depth. Jacob was instrumental in advancing our design system at Inkling, bringing in modern methods like atomic design and design tokens. He worked closely with developers to ensure everything integrated smoothly, showcasing a deep technical understanding. Honestly, he could have been a front-end developer if he wanted—a rare skill for a designer. He also led our design critiques with a level of organization and focus that the team really appreciated. His approach sparked great conversations and always resulted in clear, actionable takeaways. Most importantly, Jacob had a knack for understanding the core problem at hand. He was always listening, taking in different ideas, and asking the hard questions that pushed projects forward. This ability to dig deep and truly grasp the underlying issues is one of the most crucial skills for a UX/product designer, and Jacob excelled in it. I will always value the time I had working with Jacob—I learned a lot from him. His blend of visual design talent, technical expertise, and strategic thinking makes him an invaluable asset to any team.
Jacob is an extremely talented designer. He is the person I call when I need attention to detail and beautiful output. I had the privilege of working with him first, in a client-facing role, where we both worked with customers to bring them into the Inkling platform. In that role, Jacob was a reliably detail-oriented, meticulous visual designer with great talent. Every design he created was well-done and thoughtful and the clients always had glowing, positive things to say. Then, I switched to a product management role and Jacob switched to UX Design and we worked closely together in those roles as well. Jacob was the primary UX designer on my product team. While in that position, he performed user research when the user researcher was unavailable and combed through years of data to learn what customers had said, historically, about print and search functionality in the Inkling platform. He created thoughtful output and then created designs that were quite useful and improved the user experience greatly. I would highly recommend Jacob for any design role. He's masterful, collaborative, and an all-around excellent human with great talent and an eye for thoughtful detail.
I've worked with Jacob the past five years, first during his tenure as a front-end designer and then the last couple years as he made the jump to full-time UX Designer. We closely collaborated on several features that had been long standing customers pain points, including improving the web to printed experience for complex content. Jacob's thorough customer-centered research approach with a deep technical understanding of the complexities of web-based content allowed him to design an iterative solution that was quick to implement for the engineering team and provide customer value rapidly. Throughout the process, he also worked closely with the customers to make changes to their designs that improved their content to match their web and print needs. His partnership with product and engineering was consistently fueled by a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of web-based applications. Collaborating with Jacob was a pleasure as he approached all challenges with an open-mind and a desire to find the best solutions given the limitations of time and technology.
