Our website, the product our customers work in, and the booking flow their guests see were rebuilt using a single design system. Here's the research behind it, the decisions it forced, and an honest account of what's actually live.

For a while, Stampede's three surfaces looked like three distinct companies.

The marketing site was a Framer template. The operator dashboard had a different and distinct interface. The booking widget your guests saw had its own design again, re-themed per venue right down to the fonts. Each one worked but they just didn't look like they'd been built by the same team.

We tell operators that one connected platform beats five disconnected tools, and a company making that argument can't reasonably present as three disconnected products. So we needed a redesign. One design system, consumed by all three surfaces. Not as a style guide anyone can quietly ignore, but a new structure. The shared design language is short enough to hold in your head. Warm canvas in both modes, light Stone and dark green-black, never cold grey and never pure white or black. New typefaces and one rationed accent, the pink-to-amber gradient. A single 12px radius on everything, with hard edges reserved for structural framing and diagrams. No drop shadows. No glass.

Here's what that meant on each of the three main surfaces.

The website

This site used to run on Framer. It's now an in-house Next.js app, sharing a design system with the product it's detailing. Before anyone opened a design file, we ran a research pass across the last six months of everything we had: sales call transcripts, onboarding calls, tens of thousands of emails, thousands of support tickets and closed CRM deals. Every headline claim on the homepage traces back to language a real operator used. One of them described their setup as literally having everything everywhere. That's a better line than anything we'd have written for ourselves.

We also scanned all of our service codebase so that every capability the site claims is one the product genuinely does.

Two strategic calls shaped the rest.

Show the guest profile, don't assert it. Every platform in this category says it gives you one view of the guest. Almost nobody draws it. So the hero isn't a headline over a stock photo of people laughing in a bar. It's a hand-authored diagram: five guest signals fanning into the event hub, and out the other side, a populated profile card. You can see it on the homepage.

The operator is the hero, not us. The copy is second person and about your win. Your tools finally talk to each other, rather than Stampede connects your tools.

On AI, we went foundation-first. There's no AI-powered hero. There's one honest section, framed around what a unified data foundation makes possible. Live features are described as live. Future features are written in the future tense, which sounds like a low bar until you read the rest of the category.

Underneath, the site now owns its own content and routing, so the blog and every old link came with us rather than staying behind in someone else's CMS.

The product UI

The product is where our operators spend their actual working day. The new layout consolidates everything into one component source, one spacing model, one canvas, one accent.

The most visible change is navigation. Clicking a section no longer opens a new page but drills into that section's panel. From there, you pick your destination, with events flowing in live. Mobile gets exactly the same model behind a Menu pill. It's the same drill-in pattern the booking widget uses, which is deliberate.

The canvas now matches the brand. Dark mode went forest green last month, light went warm Stone this month. There's no neutral canvas left anywhere in the product.

Most of the design decisions are written down as law rather than passed on as folklore, and a few are enforced automatically so they survive code review on a busy week. Surfaces stay flat instead of nesting cards inside cards. Calmness is the overwhelming result of this change, numbers and text are positioned to speak, not shout. However, guest facing pages are still fully personalised to a venue.

The flagship of the new approach is the rebuilt booking timeline. It reads in real time and keeps up with rapid changes. Its detail sheet ensures that a host glancing at a booking, pays no visual cost for the rare case of needing to edit it.

Where this actually is: the new UI is staff-only and opt-in behind a toggle right now. Customers are still on the existing shell, which has been remapped to use the new navigation against the current routes. Full cutover is the plan, not the present.

The customer UI

This is the surface your guests meet, and the one where consideration matters most.

The new booking experience is a UI update with the backend deliberately untouched. The scope was full functional parity with what's live today, rebuilt entirely from the shared blocks.

The journey looks like: search by date, guests and time, into a slot grid, into a slot confirmation with the gallery and the deposit and cancellation terms up front. Then a hold with a visible countdown, so nobody's guessing whether their table is still there. Then a stepped checkout where steps only appear if they're relevant to your venue. Then confirmation, from which a guest can cancel, amend, invite the rest of their party, pre-order, or drop it in their calendar.

Enquiry submissions now keep their tracking parameters, so your marketing attribution survives the form. And if a guest's first choice isn't available, the flow can offer other dates and slots at your sister venues, and carry them through to checkout there. Previously it could only name a sister venue without offering its times.

Theming got calmer, and this is the change most likely to be felt. The canvas is now fixed, with dark mode following the guest's own device setting. Your brand enters through a single colour token, and the foreground gets an automatic luminance check so any venue colour stays readable. Venue fonts are replaced with Montserrat. That's a real trade: custom typefaces are gone, but every guest gains one coherent, legible experience with your colour palate carrying the brand.

The through-line

All three elements make the same points in different registers. To prospects, that we engineer our way out of the mess they're in, shown through drawn data models and sourced numbers instead of adjectives. To operators, that the daily tool should feel like one calm product rather than layers of admin panel. To their guests, that the booking flow should feel as considered as the venue it belongs to.

Running under all three, a rule about honesty. Future things are stated in the future tense. Claims are all evidence backed.

If you want to see where this is heading in your own account, book a walkthrough. If you'd rather read how the platform actually fits together, start with the docs.