In the summer of last year, I made a move from being Front-end Lead, then Product Owner of the design system at Auto Trader in the UK to becoming a Design Advocate at zeroheight. While I was looking at options for a move, this one seemed more unknown and scary — not using any of the skills I felt I was getting good at!

The journey I’d been through at Auto Trader was pretty amazing. I’d worked with some amazing people and had the space to try and change things in the front-end and design space I was fortunate to occupy. As things moved on and we ultimately had a design system, I’d learned so much…obviously, reading all the amazing content the community created along the way.

There are two things this new role has brought me that I want to call out: I never tire of hearing people’s design system journeys, and having time to be more thoughtful about aspects of design systems is a real privilege. Every time I hear about a design system journey, I learn something: a different context, structure, solution, or something to what might seem like the same problems. It’s so much more nuanced than making some components and is so much more about people…as is often the case.

In Community & Content at zeroheight, we have quite a broad brief of just trying to help the design systems community, which means I’ve been able to explore loads of avenues to do that in ways I wouldn’t’ve done otherwise.

Here are a few pieces that I’m happy with that I wanted to share as a bit of a recap:

• The Anatomy Of Themed Design System Components: As a long-time reader of Smashing Mag, it’s a real treat to have another piece published by them. It’s kind of a deep-dive from a UI audit to tokens and back out again.
• Design of people systems: a brief intro to a topic I want to explore; from the beginning, there’s so much more than the artifacts and design/dev work we can affect with design systems. So often, they can be a vehicle for quite profound org change.
• Life of a design token: Looking for a new way to talk about design tokens, I had a lot of fun pretending to be Sir David Attenborough, narrating them as if they were living things in a nature documentary!
• Capturing your design system decisions: Taking Architectural Decision Records from the world of tech and applying them to capture the decisions made along our design system evolution could be a powerful thing.
• Browsers and viewports and container queries, Oh My! Responsive design systems: I’m pretty opinionated about responsive design as I can’t stand device-based breakpoints…but here, I look at whatever method you use, how might we do ‘responsive stuff’ in design systems. Even more fun when we consider container queries!
• Looking at our components through different lenses: building on a concept I had while at Auto Trader, I liked the notion of using different lenses to look at the components we’re creating to see them in the round. A more holistic view than what we might otherwise get from the discipline we’re based within.
• Design files are aspirations: This was an attempt to reframe the conversation around how to think of the ‘design’ in ‘design systems’ as at Auto Trader, we consciously chose for live code to be the source of truth as that is used by our end users. That doesn’t underplay the importance of design but recognizes that without a close bond with engineering, a design is an unrealized aspiration.

I wouldnt’ve guessed I’d start a podcast, but with Dan Cork, we started What the DS?! if you want to check that out. It’s also been a hugely rewarding experience to run the Design System Triage sessions with Ben Callahan of Sparkbox. It felt like we hit it off after an initial chat and happened on this idea of a space for the community to vote on topics they want to discuss and share their experiences and problems to hopefully help each other out.

Along the way, I’ve been able to speak to folks at meet-ups and conferences, on webinars and 1:1 calls…so much fun!

Looking back, I’ve got a lot out of this first period in the job! Hopefully, people have found some of it useful! Being a part of this community is such a great thing, alongside all the other people that are super passionate and do so much to help out peers — I salute you all!