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In the pilot episode of the Design Systems Podcast, host Chris Strahl talks with Evan Lovely about design systems as a whole. What are they? Who are they meant for? What are the benefits? And more.


Evan Lovely
CTO and Co-Founder, Basalt and Knapsack
Evan is the CTO of Basalt. His pragmatism and craftsmanship are contagious within project teams. He believes that encouraging creativity, tinkering, and close collaboration leads to the most elegant solutions. A respected and trusted resource in the tech community, Evan is the Pattern Lab PHP Maintainer, an open-source platform for static site generation using atomic design.

You can find Evan on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Other Show Notes
In this episode, the guys are drinking Migration Brewing's Straight Outta Portland IPA.

Chris talks with Nam Ho about the project manager's perspective when working on design systems. They cover how you build them, what's different about project management when you're building a design system and more.

Nam Ho
EVP of Delivery and Co-Founder, Basalt and Knapsack
Nam’s energy, enthusiasm, and passion for technology drive his consistent delivery of polished end products. Nam oversees the execution of every moving element of a project and fosters communication and iterative planning at each phase--from strategy to development to implementation. Working closely with clients and core management, Nam builds cohesive, collaborative development teams that ensure every phase of each project runs smoothly stays on schedule and remains within budget. Nam employs over seven years of insight and experience with software projects in high-tech firms, delivering software rapidly, efficiently, and with minimal risk.

You can find Nam on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Other Show Notes
In this episode, the guys are drinking a Portland, OR favorite, 10 Barrel IPA. Read Brad Frost's blog on Conducting an Interface Inventory.

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Chris and Emily Campbell discuss the convergence of design and code, and what that actually looks like. They walk through what a designer role looks like in a modern digital product team and Emily explains her idea that design and development are the same. They just have different approaches to the same process or medium.

Other topics the duo touch on include questioning if designers should learn to code, intent around design and development, the importance of making intentional decisions, and more.


Emily Campbell
Senior Design Specialist, InVision
Emily is a veteran design and product practitioner. She is currently a Senior Designer on InVision's Design Transformation team, where she helps teams and leaders increase their impact by maturing their practices and developing a culture of learning and collaboration. She focuses on human-centered design, translating creative strategy into business value, building a culture of leadership, and sharing ownership across disciplines. On the side, Emily enjoys exploring the desert around her home in Moab, Utah with her husband and three kids.

You can find Emily on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Other Show Notes
Learn about Conway's Law and the Portland Swifts.

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Dan Mall calls in from the East coast to chat with Chris about design systems and their role in enterprise organizations. How does this affect the teams that work on them? The guys also discuss what digital products actually are in relation to design systems. How to create a "one ring to rule them all" type of system and does that even exits? They continue to dive into agile, designers' roles, how teams are finding they're wasting time, and much more.

Dan Mall
Creative Director, Advisor, CEO and Founder of SuperFriendly
Dan Mall is a creative director and advisor from Philly. He’s the founder and CEO of SuperFriendly, a design collaborative that helps in-house teams make better digital products with design systems. Dan is an enthralled husband & dad, author of Pricing Design, and co-founder of SuperBooked, a service that helps you find work with a little help from your friends. He writes about design and other issues on Twitter and on his industry-recognized site, danmall.me.

You can find Dan on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Chris talks with Tatiana Mac about ensuring design systems, specifically components, are accessible. The two discuss accessibility testing tools, being sure to be inclusive in forms, considering inclusion and the "why" when asking for certain data, and more inclusion topics.

Download the episode transcript:
https://files.basalt.io.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast_transcripts/005-Design-Systems-Podcast-Transcript.pdf


Tatiana Mac
Independent American designer
Tatiana Mac (she/they) is an independent American designer who works directly with organizations to build clear and coherent products and design systems.

She believes the trifecta of accessibility, performance, and inclusion can work symbiotically to improve our social landscape digitally and physically. When ethically-minded, she thinks technologists can dismantle exclusionary systems in favor of community-focused, inclusive ones.

Tatiana is an open-source maintainer, currently focused on building a dictionary called Self-Defined. Self-Defined seeks to provide more inclusive, holistic, and fluid definitions to reflect the diverse perspectives of the modern world. The dictionary will eventually include integrated bots and an API to embed into enterprise software.

Never totally pleased with design tools, she designs in browser to bring performant, semantic, and accessible visual narratives into the web. Her current obsessions are optimizing variable fonts, converting raster images into SVGs, and recreating modernist paintings in CSS grid. When she can successfully :q vim, she finds new countries to explore (36 and counting) and designs tech merch at StyleDotCSS.

You can find Tatiana on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Other Show Notes
Want to learn more about Tatiana and her work? Here are some great reference links.

• YouTube Playlist / Recorded Talks
• Website
• Twitter
• CodePen
• GitHub

Other resources discussed:

• Axe-Core
• Lighthouse

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Chris chats with Marco Suárez about his design experiences in the early days, before the term 'design systems' was official. The two walk through how to drive adoption of a design system within an organization, using branding and design in a physical space as well as digital, Marco's specific design experience and working with companies like MailChimp and Etsy on design systems, and more.

Download the episode transcript: https://files.basalt.io.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast_transcripts/006-Design-Systems-Podcast-Transcript.pdf

Marco Suárez
Product Designer, Design System Consultant, Co-Owner of Methodical Coffee
Marco Suárez has built design systems at InVision and Etsy. Now he guides companies through the process of designing and adopting their own design systems. He's also one of the owners of Methodical Coffee, a cafe and roasting company in Greenville, SC.

You can find Marco on Twitter.

Other Show Notes
In this episode, Chris and Marco discuss coffee, because sometimes it's too early in the morning for beer.

Methodical Coffee is located in Greenville, South Carolina, but you can order their beans online for an at-home experience. They serve single-origin coffees, pour overs, siphons, and cold brew.

https://methodicalcoffee.com/

Follow @Methodical_SC on Twitter.

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Chris talks to the President and CEO of the Technology Association of Oregon (TAO), Skip Newberry. While Skip may not work in the DS community day-to-day, he has a unique view on design and development from working with so many Oregon tech companies. The two talk about focusing on the use of design when helping to reach communities outside of the standard spectrum. Additionally, they discuss the idea of how ubiquity matters, to reach the most people, leveraging technology as much as possible to augment in-person connectivity, how Oregon tech companies are going through digital transformations and much more.

Download episode transcript:
http://files.basalt.io.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast_transcripts/007-Design-Systems-Podcast-Transcript.pdf


Skip Newberry
President and CEO, Technology Association of Oregon
Skip is a frequent speaker on technology trends and topics, economic development, public-private partnerships, and civic innovation. Before joining the TAO, Skip served as an economic development policy advisor to Portland Mayor Sam Adams, where he helped create Portland’s first comprehensive economic development strategy in 16 years, recognizing software as a key industry cluster. While at the City of Portland, Skip’s projects included the adoption of the nation’s first open-source software procurement policy at the municipal level, an award-winning regional open data initiative and the development of resources to support entrepreneurship, like the Portland Seed Fund. Previously, Skip was a corporate and IP attorney and entrepreneur. Skip is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Directors of TECNA, Technology Councils of North America, which is a global network of technology and entrepreneurship associations, and he serves on the community advisory board for Wells Fargo and several community-based organizations in the Portland area. Skip is also a 2012 recipient of the Portland Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 award. When he's not working on behalf of the region's tech industry, Skip enjoys exploring the Pacific Northwest with his family.

You can find Skip on LinkedIn.

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Chris talks with Salem about what a front-end architect actually does, they breakdown of web components (what they are and who uses them), cover the tools Pega systems use and how their team works, and much more.

Download the episode transcript: http://files.basalt.io.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast_transcripts/008-Design-Systems-Podcast-Transcript.pdf

Salem Ghoweri
Lead Front-End Architect for PegaSystem's Bold Design System
Salem is the lead front-end architect for the digital team at Pegasystems and the creator of the open-source Bolt Design System. He’s also worked on frontend architectural projects for Wayfair, Akamai, Panera, and Lysol, and is a core maintainer of the popular prototyping tool, Pattern Lab.

Find Salem on Twitter or LinkedIn.