Patterns Podcast

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Morgane and Chris discuss threading design into the fabric of how business works, capturing a wide range of complexity needs within your design system, moving away from traditional design tools to providing a playground that enables anyone to design with code in the browser, lessons from game development and how they apply to design systems. Guest: Morgane...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Jason Lengstorf and Chris discuss failure, self-doubt, and ultimately finding your way before switching gears and getting into designs systems, communicating the things that make teams want to adopt design systems, and an approach for broadening and deepening your experience with the technologies your system may benefit from. Guest: Jason Lengstorf is a Pri...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Varun Vachar and Chris discuss the “design graph,” creating choice in governance models, building a foundation of tools when setting up new systems, and using computational design and machine learning with design systems. Varun was at Rangle when this episode was recorded but is now at Chromatic. Guest: Varun Vachar is a Developer Experience Engineer at Chr...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Adam Argyle and Chris venture into “spicy opinion” territory and discuss when design systems are freeing vs. constraining, creating appropriate “offramps” for venturing outside of your design system, why designers ought to be proposing changes to code (aka making pull requests!), and decentralizing the human side of design systems to break down silos and en...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Stephen Gates (currently at InVision; formerly at Citi and Starwood) and Chris discuss advice for leaders needing to drive adoption and success of their design systems, how to assess and foster trust between design system creators and consumers, treating design systems as infrastructure, and the Amazing Design People List to help designers find work during...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Mina Markham (currently at Slack, formerly at Hillary For America and IBM) and Chris discuss getting executive buy-in, how to create space to continue advancing your design system, going beyond a shared language by building a shared culture, the story behind the Pantsuit Design System, and Beyoncé, of course.  Guest: Mina Markham is Staff Engineer at Slack,...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris and Micah discuss creating a singular design system that scales to support a massive app ecosystem, using tokens to align design across disparate products, and transitioning from individual teams working on many products to one company working on a library of products. Guest: Micah Godbolt is a design systems advocate, speaker, trainer, and writer. Mi...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris and Ethan discuss the parallels between design systems and responsive web design in terms of the impact on how teams design/develop digital products, creating a shared language and research as a means to build successful design systems, and where design systems are headed in the years to come. Guest: Ethan Marcotte is an independent web designer, writ...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris talks with Brad Frost and Evan Lovely about why code is the real source of truth, how to bring designers and developers together around the code, and the opportunity design systems provide for designers to focus on creative contribution rather than producing more comps. Guests: Brad Frost is a web designer, speaker, writer, consultant, and musician in...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris and Jeremy Keith discuss imbuing teams with a shared sense of ownership of their design system, creating design systems able to address unforeseen scenarios, design ops as an essential part of an effective design system, and more. Guest: Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer working with @Clearleft , playing music with @SalterCane , creator of @Huffd...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris and Charles Hall talk about the impact of accessibility, how to build more accessible products, and the role design systems play in creating accessible outcomes. Guest: Charles Hall is a Senior UX Architect at MRM and an Invited Expert of the W3C Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. You can find Charles on Twitter and LinkedIn . Host: Chris Strahl...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. 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 Ghow...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. 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 s...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. 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...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. 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...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. 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...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. 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 inclu...

Send us feedback or episode suggestions. 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...