Heard people talking about “Design tokens” but don’t really know what they are, or how to use them? You’re in the right place. — Here you’ll learn the basics of what design tokens are, how they’re used, their benefits, and some tools and resources that can help. But first, let’s start with a quick story. A common situation You’re a product designer, working on a smallish new product, without an existing design system in place. You have…

Automated tracking of token and component adoption — Early on in Onfido’s design system journey all our data and metrics were manually collected. We were a scrappy team without dedicated resources, and we did what we could within those constraints. The data we collected during this stage helped us to secure a budget and rebuild our design system…

7 steps to maximize your chances for success on the career ladder — I’ve been working in the design and tech space for the last 22 years. I’ve worked as both an individual contributor and manager across bootstrapped companies, startups, scaleups, and corporations. I’ve been promoted a number of times and been responsible for promoting others. For years I just wanted to do…

Reactions and reflections on Adobe acquiring Figma — The news hit this morning like a punch to the chest, Adobe is acquiring Figma. Design communities everywhere are filled with “NOOOOO” gifs, confusion, and hot takes galore. As a Figma fan for years, it’s a sad day for me, but not an unexpected one. Figma has been a design…

Common accessibility pitfalls in social media posts, and how to change your behavior. — Generally speaking, the web can be a pretty hostile place for people who require assistive technology to interact with it. For people who rely on screen-reader software or a braille display, the way people communicate in online communities can be difficult to read, or completely unavailable depending on the situation.

Lessons learned from bootstrapping a small design system from scratch — A lot of design system articles focus on the ideal or best ways to approach certain problems. There’s a lot less written on what doesn’t work, and what was learned from it. Our design system team has always been small and scrappy, trying to do what we can with limited…

“The best tool available today for exploring real-life questions of quantity and change is the spreadsheet.” — Bret Victor, “Kill Math” There are many reasons and ways to audit a design system. The most frequent is probably auditing the suite of products you have and looking for uses of various…

How materials, moods, and mediums affect the output of a simple circle — Midjourney is an AI image generation tool that take inputs from a human (usually through text prompts and parameters, but also other images) and uses a machine learning algorithm trained on a huge amount of image data to produce unique images. Like most machine-learning models, Midjourney can be a bit…