Posts Tagged ‘workflow’

I recently had the pleasure of doing a Q&A session with Molly Helmuth’s Design System Bootcamp cohort. The questions were great and varied, so I asked Molly if she’d be alright if I shared my answers with you all. Thankfully, […]

When design system users run into issues designing and developing with the system, they often have a hard time distinguishing between a bug, a missing feature, an intentional design deviation, a new pattern they need to create, or something else. […]

I’ve spent pretty much my entire career helping teams design software rather than pictures of software. Development is design. Frontend design. Front-of-front-end code. Front-end workshop environments. Death to the waterfall. The Hot Potato process. Designer/developer collaboration. Pattern Lab. I’ve shared […]

I came across this great post by my friend Cameron Moll on LinkedIn. He says: Telling designers they shouldn’t use high-fidelity designs early in the exploration process can be the equivalent of telling an artist they shouldn’t use paint and […]

Source: Popcorn Style – Meetings that make you smile. There’s so much greatness on display here. Popcorn Style is a tool for running standups in a way more efficient and fun way! Here’s why I love it: Respect: we need […]

That one weird trick? TALK. What do you do when someone doesn’t see what component they’re looking for in the design system? TALK. What do you do when someone has questions about what a component does, if it meets their […]

One of my favorite Josh lines that’s really stood the test of time and cuts through a lot of noise in a conversation: Don’t put crap in the design system. Josh Clark What is crap? Crap is rushed work, low-quality […]

The most crucial mistake in the collaboration between designers and engineers happens when we conflate this division of tools with a need for a strong division of labor. Treating design and engineering as two completely separate processes leads to an […]

What does a mature, end-to-end design system look like in a big, complex organization? What are all the moving pieces, and how do they hang together as a well-considered architecture? What’s required and what’s optional? Hold onto your butts, because […]

I love this initiative from Shamsi Brinn: No Handoff: close the gap between product and engineering. Imagine a project where teams work together at each stage, progressively improving the end result based on qualitative and quantitative data. Project handoff is […]

This post is a long time coming. I’ve been using Notion since 2017, but it’s been a slow journey to get to a point where I can say that our relationship is official. Notion is now an invaluable tool for […]

Successful design systems are finely tuned to the organization they serve. At the beginning of every client design system engagement, we spend a great deal of time learning about our client’s culture, politics, products, tools, and workflows. Sure, we’ll get […]

You can have a comprehensive design system that contains a slew of well-structured components, thorough documentation, thoughtful guidelines, and a well-considered design language. But if a design system user can’t get done what they’re trying to get done, the whole […]

As part of Dan and my designer+developer collaboration series, I recorded another video building upon the work we’ve done so far. If you’re not caught up, feel free to watch the other videos: Video 1: Designer+Developer pair session Video 2: […]

Fantastic article by Snook about designer/developer relations. Everything that a designer draws in a Sketch or Photoshop file needs to be turned into code. Code needs to be developed, delivered to the user, and maintained by the team. That means […]

Following up on the video Dan and I recorded that shows how we collaborate as designer and developer, I recorded a video of me doing a bit of head-down development work. Dan and I mention in our first video that […]

I’ve had the extreme privilege of collaborating on a bunch of projects with my friend Dan Mall (@danmall) over the last five and a half years. Dan is a designer. I’m a developer. And together, we’ve been refining our process to […]

You can write words explaining how to properly use a toaster, draw pictures of toasters, and even create more efficient ways to draw pictures of toasters. But at the end of the day, if you don’t have a functioning toaster, […]

Creating a design system to serve an organization’s digital products is a delicate dance of decision-making, compromise, and balance. There are some intrinsic frictions that every organization creating and maintaining has to address. There’s no shortage of eternal battles in the […]

Adam McClean and Dan Mall had a fantastic chat with Jared Spool about the work we did to help transform About.com into the new Dotdash. We took their monolithic brand and exploded it into a suite of topic-specific brands, with […]

In my experience consulting with and workshopping with companies of all shapes and sizes, I always ask “who owns the frontend code here?” I help web teams create design systems and collaborate more effectively, so it’s important for me to […]

I’m helping my client’s web development team establish some frontend guidelines as we roll up our sleeves to build a new website from the ground up. We’ve done a projects together in the past, but (naturally) they were on pretty […]

Somewhere between design – a world of personas, pixels, and polish – and engineering – a world of logic, loops, and linux  – lies frontend design. Frontend design involves creating the HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code that makes up a user […]

The frontend considerations of an organization are many. We’re overwhelmed by tools, processes, workflows, styles, opinions, and ever-changing best practices. In order for frontend teams to create cohesive, consistent work, it’s important for organizations to establish some guidelines for how […]

Dan Mall posted an absolutely epic article that encapsulates a lot of the pattern-based concepts the community has been advancing for the last few years. I highly recommend reading it in its entirety. Here are some key highlights I took away […]

On a recent episode of Shop Talk Show, Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert fielded a question regarding style guides and where they fit into the design/development process. Here was the question: I’m working on a redesign for an old website. […]

Andrew Smyk (@andrewsmyk) discusses how he iterates on his web designs. There’s a strong focus on getting ideas out of his head and onto paper as quickly as possible, which is excellent. I enjoy how he cuts up his sketches to play with […]

Note: I’m going to start posting some of my email responses to people here on my blog. I think a lot of people’s questions are valuable and think they’re worthy of a broader discussion. And I hope the advice I’m […]

It’s so wonderful to see teams using Pattern Lab to launch successful projects. In fact, it makes me a little teary-eyed. In this case, the Harvard Business Review team used Pattern Lab to create an interface design system for their […]

Dave Olsen (@dmolsen) nails it. In his talk at Confab EDU, Dave addresses the frustrations of our web design and development process, and how a pattern-driven workflow can help. Dave describes the many benefits of pattern-driven workflow: Patterns encourage communication […]