About Wade Meredith
A designer who can code. Fascinated with the intersection of art and technology since childhood. Making stuff that empowers and excites people since 2005 (ish.)
Lincoln Logs, LEGO, and Student Film
A compulsive creator and lifelong learner, I have scratched my creative itch with technology for as long as I can remember. It started with lincoln logs, then LEGO, and then Printshop on my Dad's Macintosh Performa 6200. By the time high school rolled around, I was designing posters for drama productions where I could also often be found on the stage. Or I'd be holed up in the media center using Adobe Premier to edit my student films.
I worked with my best friend as a live camera operator at the local TV station. Good Morning Four States was filmed live from 6-7 a.m. Monday through Friday. She and I had to be there at five in the morning to set up the studio, tear scripts, film the show, and edit stingers for the day. By the time we were in class and the first bell rang at eight, we had already drunk several Mountain Dews and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. We were idiots, but for the first time I was making real stuff and getting paid for it.
In my senior year, one of our films eventually got selected to be shown at a student film festival at the local community college. They kicked us out when they discovered we were still in high school.
Metal Bands & HTML Signatures
I left Joplin to study communications at MSU in Springfield, MO. However, I was more interested in working on vintage Ford Broncos, riding motorcycles, and attending my roommate's metal shows in dive bars. It sounds cooler than it was–we were also colossal gaming nerds and indie music snobs.
Around that time, I got married. I stopped smoking (she's a dentist), sold the motorcycle (married), and moved to Kansas City to support her in school. Dentists make more than unpaid roadies. I got a job working as a marketing assistant for a large general contractor and spent my free time reading a LOT of blogs and online forums as one did in 2004.
I also picked up a hobby of designing HTML signatures for the gaming-web-forum-dwelling jackals I called friends. I was good at it, and then people started paying me to do it. Now, I was getting somewhere.
Getting paid to design little HTML images inspired me to create a website. Blogs and web standards were exploding (it was 2005), so I started there. I muddled my way through CSS, Javascript, and PHP. I picked up enough DevOps to keep it all running along the way. This was called being a webmaster at the time. It took me six months, but I built a WordPress website with my own custom theme from scratch.
After writing about six hundred blog posts over a year and a half, I clocked 2.5 million monthly readers and made some real money as a one-person show. I'd redesigned and rebuilt the site from the ground up thrice. I liked that part better than the writing and constant social media marketing. So, I sold the site to a Canadian blog network, stayed on for six months to train my replacement, and got a portfolio together.
Integrated Marketing
I managed to leverage my portfolio into my first job, (which I despised) in the industry. My nasty disposition was due to the place being an black-hat SEO chop-shop, building websites for realtors and home builders. Never before had I seen such a hive of scum and villainy. Daily, I got handed lousy web designs in the form of Photoshop files and was turning them into ASP.NET websites, employing every shady SEO trick in the book demanded by our resident "marketing expert."
Within a month, I left and found gainful employment at a small integrated marketing agency called Voltage Creative. It was amazing! This was my family for six years, and it's where I really learned about the business of design, technology, and marketing... and how it could all come together to make magical stuff for people. At any given time, between five and ten of us worked out of a little open office loft in downtown Kansas City, MO.
Before I left, I got to wear all the hats: account manager, graphic designer, copywriter, software engineer, project manager, IT support, and sales. The experience was great, and I still have friends and mentors from Voltage Creative. Many of whom I've recruited to work with me, and have been recruited by, over the years.
Experience Design
Having become an excellent creative technology generalist, I narrowed my focus, working as an interaction designer at a real software shop. We built a CRM system from scratch to crack the higher education market. I spent six years there, moving up the ranks until I was the Director of User Experience for the last two years. I had a great little team of designers, copywriters, and engineers. We built hundreds of screens and dozens of user flows through different features. I was able to truly sharpen my axe in terms of design vision, technical leadership, and software product development.
VML, a prestigious global marketing firm, eventually recruited me as an information architecture specialist. VMLY&R is like Voltage Creative but with 1000 times more employees, money, and scope. They have clients like Pfizer, Ford, Coca-Cola, Wendy's, and the US Navy. Working on massive projects for huge clients, I specialized in developing content management systems, information architecture design, taxonomies, and tooling.
Software Engineering Management
I've spent the last few years managing multiple software development teams for a large financial services company. For two years, thanks to evidence-based planning and a modified Agile project management practice, we delivered dozens of software features to millions of users–on time and budget.
Present Day
Currently based in Kansas City, I have enjoyed working remotely with hugely diverse teams worldwide for more than ten years. I continue to work professionally with technology and design. I also coach my kids' rec league soccer team and build hi-fi audio-visual systems.
I am currently writing, designing, and coding SeekHiFi.com. The front end is handlebars.js and the back end is Ghost Pro.