Announcement: I’m Going Independent!

I’m excited to share that I — along with my brother Ian — are going fully independent and will be focusing on courses, workshops/training, and other fun adventures.

A bittersweet farewell to Big Medium

Josh Clark and I had been closely collaborating since 2013, and at the beginning of 2023, I (along with Ian) joined Big Medium. It made sense to finally present as a unified front since we were already effectively operating as an agency with our fantastic group of stalwart collaborators.

We carried out our stellar work as usual, helping our client’s teams evolve & adopt design systems, explore & adopt new technologies, and establish more collaborative & effective workflows. However, operating under a banner set up an interesting dynamic for me; my interests, passions, and enthusiasms are diverse, many, and don’t always neatly fit into the boundaries of a single business. Josh as always was encouraging and accommodating of my other adventures, but even with Josh’s blessing I’d still found myself feeling guilty if I was working on, writing about, or doing things that weren’t directly related to the company. It’s a weird mental dynamic!

But beyond that dynamic, I began to reconsider the nature of the work I want to do. I’ve been working in client services for my entire 20-year career, and while my core mission has always been to make great things and help people, I began to realize that there might be better ways for me to accomplish my mission than doing in-the-weeds client services work. I genuinely love all of our clients and collaborators, but I’ll admit I don’t love collecting authenticator apps like Pokemon or having hour-long calls to figure out who to escalate my login issue to. Those paper cuts all add up and I felt like I wasn’t able to operate as effectively as I’d like.

It’s taken a lot of deep soul searching and incredibly difficult work to arrive at the decision to set out on my own, but ultimately it became clear that it needed to happen in order for me to realize my true potential.

It’s an end of an era for sure! Bittersweet is such a weird and complex emotion, and I’m allowing myself to feel all the weirdness and complexity. But I do know how grateful I am to Josh for all he’s done for me. I do know how grateful I am for Jessi, Kevin, Veronika, Abby, Sam, TJ, and all of our other collaborators. I do know how grateful I am for all of the clients who welcomed us into their worlds and trusted us to help them grow and evolve. I’m so incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished together over the years, and these vast and varied experiences will continue to shape my work and life.

Big Medium is up to some exciting new work; they’ll continue helping clients design for what’s next and will continue being thoughtful, pragmatic leaders to guide the design community through this ever-changing digital landscape. I’m so excited for this new — and overwhelmingly positive — chapter for Josh, the Big Medium crew, and everyone!

Courses

So how will I be spending my time? Ian and I are laser focused on creating courses, starting with our first course Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens.

Promo image for Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens which features atomic design's 5 icons with a new icon to the left of atoms consisting of three small circles. Those circles indicate design tokens.

We even made an infomercial for it!

I explain why we’re so excited:

We’ve have seen so many design system teams struggle to establish/evolve a solid design token architecture, which is why we’re so excited to create this comprehensive course. We want to save teams time, money, and agony by sharing all of our hard-earned lessons, core concepts, Figma and code architecture, naming conventions, and processes to help teams successfully create and maintain robust design token systems.

Right now we have over 2 hours of preorder-exclusive content published and we’re going to be rolling out the full course content iteratively over the coming weeks. If you’re interested in advancing your design systems game, consider preordering the course! Right now we’re donating a portion of every pre-sale to helping feed people displaced by the LA wildfires.

This is a new adventure, and to say we are PUMPED is a supreme understatement. Since this will be our main focus, so we’d welcome any and all help getting the word out!

Workshops, training, and light consulting

In addition to courses, we’ll continue to help teams through workshops — both as a supplement to our courses and as a standalone team training — as well as some light consulting (“light” meaning “please don’t send me a company laptop”). If you’re interested in our courses or would welcome a workshop to level up your team’s design system game, get in touch!

Positivity, creativity, unabashed enthusiasm, and my life’s work

Over the years I’ve been told by many people that I am a unique and positive force of nature. I’ve always “aww shucks”ed it away because goddamn is it awkward for me to receive compliments. But what if I actually embraced it? Leaned into it? Acted on it? Act not in an ego-centric “look how awesome I am!” way, but rather in a vehicle to make great things and help people?

I want to direct my energy, enthusiasm, perspective, and skills at pursuits that will lift people up, inspire them, empower them, help them lead more creative and fulfilling lives.

Frostapalooza was kinda the pilot project for this attitude. I write:

I also had this palpable-yet-ineffable desire to counter all of the negativity that seemed to be plaguing my family — and society writ large — for years. I’ve endured some awful and traumatic things, and the question on loop in my head was “What’s the exact opposite of those awful things?”

I feel an urgent mission to remind them of the wonder, joy, fun, love, and transcendence we’re capable of experiencing in our finite time on earth. I want to help people (re)discover their potential as human beings. I want to connect people and lift them up. I want people to feel the boundless love and positive energy that is always there even though it’s often elusive in our day-to-day lives. I want to do creative things and help people.

I truly feel we accomplished that mission with Frostapalooza. This concert was an embodiment of my philosophy of life, and I now have the confidence and perspective to carry that into all aspects of my life.

Brad smiling at Frostapalooza, wearing a bass and a loud suit

I learned a lot about myself through the course of this adventure. I learned I’m capable of doing amazing things in this life and in this world. I learned that I can bring amazing people together to do unique and creative things. I learned to finally and fully trust myself, my intuition, my energy, and my abilities. I learned that I don’t need to compromise my instincts or my vision. I learned that my passions and enthusiasms are too big for any defined box. I learned that not only can I realize what really matters in life for myself, I can help others see it as well.

What does this mean, exactly? Stick around and find out. I’ve got projects and ideas galore that I will be pursuing and launching in 2025 and beyond. I. AM. VERY. VERY. VERY. EXCITED.

Here we go!

Thanks so much for your continued support and love. Onwards and upwards!

Brad with his mouth open standing in profile with a stream of many colored lines emerging from his mouth