Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Corey and Chris discuss how design systems represent an organization’s lifeblood, the sisyphean parts of design system maintenance, and what stands out about design system culture at Compass. Guest: Corey is the Head of Design Systems at Compass. He has made a career out of building and leading design teams through complicated enterprise challenges to create experiences that customers love. He has years of experience within agencies, consulting firms, and...
Apr 04, 2022•33 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Last week Knapsack announced Patterns , the leadership-focused design systems retreat. Chris and Ryan Peterson, Knapsack's VP Marketing, and Chris talk about the what, why, and who behind Patterns, an invite-only retreat for 50 engineering, product, and design leaders. Curious about why it's focused on leader-level topics? Wondering if it will help you get more investment in your design system? List in to learn about what we're planning—and why you (or yo...
Mar 31, 2022•11 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Matt, Veda, and Chris discuss how Matt and Veda have incorporated accessibility and inclusion into one of the world’s most well-known design systems, Spectrum. Matt shares his experience getting accessibility principles into Spectrum on the ground floor, and Veda discusses how inclusion fits into design systems. Guests: Matt May is the Head of Inclusive Design at Adobe. His work includes integrating inclusive design practices across every aspect of the Ad...
Mar 21, 2022•42 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Wayfair, the ubiquitous online retailer, is more than just wayfair.com : the company owns Perigold, Joss & Main, and Birch Lane. Neva, Rogin, and Chris discuss how Wayfair united three disparate design systems into one; the gradual process of building a holistic design system team; achieving cross-functional design system adoption, and the merits of overthinking. Guests: Neva Corbo-Hudak is the Product Design Lead at Wayfair. She’s a multidisciplinary...
Mar 14, 2022•47 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Mike and Chris discuss design systems at the enterprise level, the history of systems, and UX design at the beginning of the internet. Guest: Mike Bowser is the Design Director, Design Systems at Vista. He is a UX/UI designer, design team leader, and educator with expertise in design systems, UX research, and UI design. His recent focus is closing the gap between how we concept and design and how products are actually built. He’s also interested in the gr...
Feb 08, 2022•27 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Zach, Aaron, and Chris discuss the commonalities between design systems and products, as well as how a product-driven mindset can help your design systems achieve new levels of enterprise adoption and scale. Guest : Zach Hendershot is a Managing Partner at Crux Digital . He is a leader with a diverse background of building and growing digital products within startups and large enterprises. He's passionate about scaling, reusability, and great customer exp...
Nov 29, 2021•48 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Sit tight—this is a long one! Stephen Gates and Chris discuss the real value of design systems, what designers and football players have in common, and how to apply design methodology to day-to-day work. Guest: Stephen Gates is Senior Vice President of Omni-channel Product Design for WW. In this role, he is responsible for the design of WW’s end-to-end member experience across all digital, virtual, and physical touchpoints, to create a cohesive wellness e...
Nov 15, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Gina and Chris discuss the importance of real-deal content in your designs, defining “good design” for your company, and how to set effective, meaningful KPIs for design work. Guest: Gina is the Principal Analyst, Design and Accessibility, at Forrester Research. Her research focuses on experience design organizations, scaling design, accessibility, and inclusive design. You can find Gina on Forrester’s blog , on Twitter as @ ginabhawalkar , and on LinkedI...
Nov 02, 2021•40 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Want to help the design systems community learn more about adoption? Take our four-minute survey . Microsoft’s Josh Cusick and Chris discuss how to convey intent when working with a design system, the importance of buy-in for a successful design system culture, and whether or not your design system will ever be finished. Guest: Josh Cusick is a product designer at Microsoft, working on Microsoft’s Fluent Design System and mentor at ADPList . You can find ...
Oct 29, 2021•24 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Want to be part of the industry's first-ever report on design system adoption? Click here to take part in our 4-minute survey. In this deep-dive episode, Danny, Robin, and Chris discuss the differences and similarities of design systems at different stages of maturity, including ROI measurement; who should manage your design system, and how to create a balance of power between designers and developers working on your design system. Robin Cannon is the Glo...
Sep 21, 2021•1 hr 13 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Leonardo De La Rocha and Chris discuss the “federated” design system model, how to connect design systems to business needs, designing friction-free cross-platform experiences, and C-suite awareness of design needs. Guest: Lonardo De La Rocha is an engineer turned pixel-pusher turned creative executive and adviser. He currently serves as Director of Intuit Design System in Mountain View, CA, and was previously creative director leading Facebook's art depa...
Jul 02, 2021•25 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Audrey and Chris discuss the vision guiding Xero’s design system team, how co-ownership helps design system teams thrive, the processes she uses for managing a global team, and how the Xero design system team approaches modernization. Guest: Audrey has been designing digital experiences at high-growth technology companies for over 12 years. She’s passionate about growing teams to be their best through shipping product with impact. You can find Audrey at h...
Jun 21, 2021•32 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Jess Clark and Chris discuss the meaning of design systems and the potential of design systems as a service. What can design systems offer us beyond infrastructure? How can approaching design systems as products, rather than repositories, increase their capabilities? Guest: Jess Clark is Director of Product Design, Design Systems at LinkedIn, where she is responsible for enabling quality design at scale through tools, collaboration, and LinkedIn’s Design ...
Jun 07, 2021•44 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. This episode is a little bit longer—okay, a lot longer—than our usual. Chrome developer advocate Adam Argyle and Chris Strahl talk about tokens in all their glory without worrying about time limits. If you’ve ever wondered about the limits of tokens and what’s left to explore in the token stratosphere, check out this podcast. Guest: Adam Argyle is a Chrome CSS Developer Advocate at Google, creator of VisBug , co-host of The CSS Podcast , developer, former...
May 17, 2021•2 hr 1 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Maya Hampton and Chris discuss why design systems need to be flexible, the role of a product manager in a design system, and viewing design systems as products. Guest : Maya Hampton is the product manager of REI’s design system, where she leads a cross-functional team, including design and engineering, to help scale REI's branding and consistent UX across the co-op’s digital portfolio. You can find Maya on Medium , Twitter as @himaya , and LinkedIn . Host...
May 03, 2021•44 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Jehad Affoneh, Scott Mathis, and Chris discuss the advantages of open-source, the role of content in design systems, the pattern-based approach to building apps, and similarities between music and tokens. Guests: Jehad Affoneh is Chief Design Officer at Splunk (formerly Head of Design at VMware). He’s an experienced design and business leader who writes frequently about user experience, leadership, management, and business. You can find Jehad at mynameisj...
Apr 12, 2021•41 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Dave Calleja and Chris discuss getting clients to sign off on design systems, strategies for getting executive buy-in, and the role of designer as evangelist. Guest: Dave Calleja is Head of Design at Isobar. He’s been working in digital and UX for over 15 years, from tiny teams to federal government projects. At Isobar he’s pursuing a strong passion for developing insight-aware, hypothesis-led experimentation cultures to empower experience-led transformat...
Mar 29, 2021•37 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Matthew and Chris discuss what’s exciting about design tokens, how APIs streamline communication, the magic of standardized files, and how to spend less time copy-pasting. Guest: Matthew Ström is a Brooklyn-based design leader currently working as Director of Design at SimpleHealth. He’s previously led design teams at Dow Jones, SoundCloud, and Bitly, and he writes about design on his website, matthewstrom.com. You can find Matthew on Twitter as @ilikesci...
Mar 15, 2021•37 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Jennie and Chris discuss the critical role of storytelling for your design system, using learning moments to drive adoption, what comes next after launching your system, qualitative and quantitative ways to measure system success, and content strategies for design systems. Guest: Jennie Yip is a hybrid design engineer with a heart for elegant user interfaces, simple user experiences, and beautifully crafted code. She is currently focused on evolving Atlas...
Feb 02, 2021•37 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Avery and Chris discuss lessons learned from design and development partnering up vs. making work an “us vs. them” thing, embracing intentionality and viewing all decisions through that lens, focusing on reuse and trust to help your design system gain traction across your organization. Guest: Avery Oldt is Founder & Chief Design Officer at Blermph , a creative studio that helps organizations build the great teams and great culture that produce great p...
Jan 19, 2021•43 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Eric and Chris discuss how and why Facebook’s design system has evolved over time, anticipating deviation and its positive impact on adoption and contribution, getting other teams to think like system designers and empowering them to create their own systems, what signals to consider when measuring the success of your system and advocacy work. Guest: Eric Lobdell is a Design Systems Team Lead at Facebook, managing a button that’s touched over 3 million ti...
Jan 05, 2021•36 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Nick and Chris discuss standing up a design system in 2016, serving development teams that didn’t have access to designers at the time, accelerating and amplifying the value of design, freeing up designers to focus on high-value problems, considerations and tactics for driving adoption, how design systems create internal communities that bring design and developers together, building on-brand and UX-compliant apps quickly in a diverse technology ecosystem...
Dec 15, 2020•38 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Vidya and Chris discuss pathways to becoming a design systems leader, having a content strategy within your design system, personalization considerations, measuring the success of your design system, linking your design system to a broader design strategy, and more. Guest: Vidya Nayak is Design Director Member & Design Systems at SoFi, former design lead at Moody’s, Disney, Fox Digital (News Corp), and Rodale. Coffee, books, and travel lover. Guitar a...
Nov 25, 2020•32 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Demian and Chris discuss what design tokens are and why they are a critical part of any design system, getting developers more involved in the design system discipline, an exciting new way to integrate design tokens between design tools and VS Code, and how surfing relates to design tokens. Guest: Demian Borba is a Product Manager on Adobe XD (working on XD since 2015!), UX & Design Thinking advocate, and speaker. You can find Demian on Twitter as @de...
Nov 03, 2020•38 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Jina and Chris discuss the inception of design tokens and Theo during Jina’s time at Salesforce, the correlation between design systems and community building, shared ownership instead of governance, why “design systems are not a thing,” and more. Guest: Jina Anne is the Founder of Clarity , Creator of design.systems , and Co-Chair at Design Tokens W3C Community Group. You can find Jina at jina.design , on Twitter as @jina , and on LinkedIn . Host: Chris ...
Oct 21, 2020•43 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Rick and Chris discuss deputizing evangelists to drive adoption and reduce fragmentation, contribution models and thinking about the areas to own vs. areas to share ownership vs. areas to give up ownership, using design systems to share innovation across teams, measuring design system efficacy, and more. Guest: Rick Rodriguez is Head of Design Systems at Walmart Labs, an avid runner, hand letterer and superfan of cappuccinos and donut breaks. You can find...
Sep 29, 2020•41 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Morgane and Chris discuss threading design into the fabric of how business works, capturing a wide range of complexity needs within your design system, moving away from traditional design tools to providing a playground that enables anyone to design with code in the browser, lessons from game development and how they apply to design systems. Guest: Morgane Peng is Design Director at Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking, illustrator, speaker...
Sep 01, 2020•38 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Jason Lengstorf and Chris discuss failure, self-doubt, and ultimately finding your way before switching gears and getting into designs systems, communicating the things that make teams want to adopt design systems, and an approach for broadening and deepening your experience with the technologies your system may benefit from. Guest: Jason Lengstorf is a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify, host of Learn With Jason , and writer. You can find...
Aug 19, 2020•44 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Varun Vachar and Chris discuss the “design graph,” creating choice in governance models, building a foundation of tools when setting up new systems, and using computational design and machine learning with design systems. Varun was at Rangle when this episode was recorded but is now at Chromatic. Guest: Varun Vachar is a Developer Experience Engineer at Chromatic , formerly Director of Technology at Rangle , and generative art enthusiast. You can find Var...
Aug 06, 2020•29 min
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Adam Argyle and Chris venture into “spicy opinion” territory and discuss when design systems are freeing vs. constraining, creating appropriate “offramps” for venturing outside of your design system, why designers ought to be proposing changes to code (aka making pull requests!), and decentralizing the human side of design systems to break down silos and enable innovation and enhancements to spread freely throughout your product teams. Guest: Adam Argyle ...
Jul 08, 2020•57 min
