Both have a similar influence on two different jobs, design and development, creating a new division of labor. — Design systems and the designer roles Design systems are somewhat new. Even if everybody in the design sphere is talking about them right now, the consequences of their introduction in big companies are yet to be fully understood. In my experience, one of those consequences is the separation of designers into two categories:

What I learned by building a design system from scratch — Context I was hired in February 2018 by the VP of Experience to build the design system of the company. A couple of attempts had been made before my time, but none had gained the necessary momentum. After getting familiar with the situation and interviewing stakeholders at multiple levels, I realized…

… and no, it doesn’t have to be how to code. Here are a few points that have helped me assess what technical knowledge is necessary for designers to be successful. Why it’s not necessary for designers to know how to code One very simple reason: division of labor. I’m not saying designers won’t benefit greatly from adding code to their…

Who wants a better solution than throwing a random number in a z-index and hope for the best? — The situation In a complex application, developers will always compete for the highest number to put an element on top of the rest, without easily knowing what layers are already in place. One cannot simply just write: .my-modal { z-index: calc(on-top-of-the-page); } .tooltip-on-my-modal { z-index: calc(on-top-of-my-modal); }

Part of our work on Radiant — Thoughtspot’s design system — was to recreate our Avatar component, and more specifically its crescent shape when we need to display more than one at a time. Our first intent was to set a white border to the round shape, which might look…

Now that I’m close to having 20 years of experience (shhhh 🙊) as a designer and front-end developer, I’m realizing that I’m constantly operating based on a few principles. Here there are — in no particular order — in case you’re looking for inspiration. 1. Use the right tool for the right job. A good tool is designed to…

As a UX Engineer at Thoughtspot and manager of Radiant (the company’s design system), one of my goals is to improve the code base of our product and especially the CSS: I’m focusing on getting visual consistency across the board (243 unique colors!) …