Throughout my career I have evolved, extended and created design patterns and I center on producing simple, human experiences.

My focus on design systems and broader design culture is a large part of that. Recent work includes standards definition, tenets and process within my product teams.

I am also an Amazon Design Mentor, and regularly contribute to design culture within the company and the wider design community.

I enjoy creating tangible art projects, contribute to the annual Steamroller Smackdown and have exhibited at Seattle Design Week – more of that on my blog.

This year I will be attending Adobe Max as a member of the Enterprise Customer Advisory Board.

Collaborative ideation

In thinking about collaboration, and how as designers and developers we naturally look for order and efficiency — in our work as well as through process, I wrote a post on Medium about collaborative ideation and discovery.

“The magic happens when you include everyone from the outset.”

A large part of  how that relates to the design process is communication, and what’s really interesting to me about this is thinking of the design process simply as a guide for design thinking – directed by collaboration.

Systems & culture in practice

In creating a sustainable design system for WorkDocs I helped to unite the product teams around a central visual language, and a shared understanding of experience tenets: User first, Frictionless, Coherent, Simple, Connected.

An updated design framework defined the positioning of actions and main navigation, and provided a solid foundation upon which to structure and evolve the UI.

To facilitate cross team alignment, I created a streamlined process for communicating evolving design patterns that used a combination of cloud sharing tools and included components hosted on code.amazon.com (basically Git).

Style guides, typography, icons, CSS and React components were all part of my process and standards work.

function Button() {
return (
<button>Action</button>
);
}
ReactDOM.render(<button></button>, mountNode);

View above example on jscomplete.

I designed, built and maintained the below website – produced as a communication tool for the design thinking and process behind the product as we made changes and looked toward the future.

The site also features an Instagram feed and studio playlist.

Building unity

A core benefit of building an extensible design systems is that it  accelerates the design process, and facilitates alignment between all teams involved in product development.

Culture and standards

I find that sharing process, new thinking and fostering culture and principles with mentors, mentees, and the wider design community is as much enlightening as it is inspiring.

There’s always more to learn about the craft, and there’s always opportunity to set new design and operational standards.