Beyond the px — Github’s Aurora Pleguezuelo on focus, design systems, and stick figures
Happy August everyone! This month’s Beyond the PX article is with Github’s Aurora Pleguezuelo, who landed in a design position after first taking a stab at journalism.
I really enjoy her approach to creativity, using flow diagrams at every stage to ensure she fully understands the concepts. It’s great advice.
Enjoy.
For those not in the know, who are Github?
GitHub is the world’s largest software development platform for teams and open source communities.
You use it to plan your projects, collaborate on code, and deploy your apps.
What has been your design journey up until now?
My journey in design is best described as a mix of unrelated experiences and tangents.
It started off with a failed attempt at journalism in college. A few years later, in a second attempt (this time successful), I completed my advertising degree. From then I started pivoting from art direction and print to web design because I loved how design and motion could be combined.
I soon became interested in interaction. Nothing fancy about it, I just loved designing things that looked like ‘things’ as opposed to abstract stuff or purely communicational artwork. Thanks to the Internet and amazing mentorship I soon realized there was more to it than just aesthetics and then I was sold.
What does your typical morning look like?
I used to have a nice routine but now it’s all over the place.
Pre-pandemic, I’d wake up nice and early, get coffee and catch up with the other timezones: email, Slack, GitHub issues… I love how calm it is in the mornings so I get a lot done. Then I’d choose one big task to work on for a full hour before the gym and then have 3 to 4 hours of focus before meetings would start.
I like to reserve my mornings for small operations and open loops and deep focus in the afternoon.
What does your design stack look like?
I use Figma as my main tool to design mockups and for anything visual.
I like to say I use Notion because I do love the concept of it and I do use it sometimes when I start a project. But the truth is that it’s too slow and complex to use as a note-taking app so I don’t really find a place for it in my workflow. For notes I use Bear instead, I love it because it supports markdown and it’s super fast.
At work we use GitHub for everything, so I use repositories to manage and document projects and it’s our main async communication tool with the teams.
Do you have any design hacks?
I have no spatial vision whatsoever so I have a hard time visualizing complex systems and thinking in terms of more than one dimension. (Yeah, I would not say I was born to be a designer but hey, I believed in myself and went for it!).
So I’ve recently become really keen on drawing diagrams and schemas for absolutely everything. For example, If I don’t understand how our design team mates use our Figma library, I go and draw stick figures and boxes to figure out how the process works. I do the same with my personal life. I don’t know if this is particularly smart but allowing myself to find creative ways to understanding things helps me a lot.
Do you find it hard to define what you do to your friends?
I used to find it harder before but as I gained more experience I found it easy to explain what I do without buzzwords or terms that might mean differently outside of our jobs.
I often use Ikea modular furniture to explain what I do. I go ’think of how those pieces of furniture work so well with most accessories and how you can build different things with the same pieces… my job is to design those pieces but for software’.
Do your career aspirations encroach your life?
One side of me that loves art. I’m not particularly good at anything artistic but I do love finding different creative outlets.
Looking at visually pleasing things like photographs or music videos is very important to me. But when it comes to my actual job I guess it influences how I look at everything I do as part of a system.
As an example, I went from thinking a cooking recipe was just a piece of paper telling me what to do out of pure serendipity.
Now I see it as a system of ingredients with different functions that together achieve a predictable output. It should be more boring to look at things that way but I actually find it very fun.
How do you design ‘for the future’?
In design systems we need to think about the future as part of our process. Every project has at least two lanes. Long-term lane and short-term lane.
We spend the majority switching from one lane to the other so we can see where each hypothesis can take us. The best way to work like this with confidence is to have a very internalized idea of the product’s vision and also generate a lot during exploration phases.
What drew you to working with design systems?
I think design systems gave me the perfect part of the design job. I was always more interested in the craft and how pieces connect together so when I peeked into design systems I stayed.
In product design I would always spend so much time on the visual side and would go down rabbit holes whenever I would find opportunities to create guidelines and standards. When I realized there was value in that work and there was a way to do it without jeopardizing the roadmap I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
What’s your team dynamic?
I love my team so much! There’s currently 15 of us and growing. And we’re spread through 5 different time zones, so we can say the design systems team never sleeps!
Our team is made up of designers, engineers and hybrid or very technical designers. The fact that we work so closely together helps build a design language that is meaningful to both disciplines.
How we work really varies from project to project, Sometimes two or more people will collaborate on the same area to make sure different perspectives influence the project. In some projects, one person will lead one phase and will hand over for someone else to lead in the next phase.
What advice would you give for those interested in kick starting a career in design?
There’s not just ‘one right way’ to get started, therefore don’t feel defeated if your beginnings don’t map out to the beginnings of the people you admire.
Take on your path with curiosity and excitement and talk to a lot of folks who do what you want to do. If you start conversations following those two principles you’re very likely to find opportunities as well.
Also, personal advice is to delete Instagram.
I’m so excited to work with people fresh out of college or just folks who are entering the market for the first time. Interns and juniors aren’t just here to learn, they’re here so that we learn from them too.
If you’re doing the product thing right, you want designers in different phases of work experience.
What are your thoughts on burnout?
This question is kind of tricky. On one side I think we need to speak up against companies who take advantage of their employees. This lack of work-life balance in tech as a default needs to stop. It’s so important for leaders to stop measuring a person’s work ethic based on how many hours they invest in a project.
That being said, I think that for some folks long hours overtime is a personal choice and have the privilege to do it for fun. I don’t think we should shame people for it either.
Thank you for reading, Aurora’s open and honest approach to design and building a career was refreshing and Github are lucky to have such a talented createive.
See you next time.
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