I’m leaving work for two months to become a dad(!!!) and drafted a list of things—“asynchronous access to my brain”—that I take with me to work every day.

🧵 1. Design everything three times. Once using the design system to a tee; once pushing the design system’s limits just a bit—change in color, text, or spacing to suit your problem; and once imagining the design system doesn’t exist at all.

After much consideration I think I’ve figured out my two dominant design processes I don’t really know yet under which circumstances I might take one approach over another, but typically the latter (more public, more cooperative) is what I do when stakeholders aren’t super on board or aligned. Make them feel like they’re critical in this process.

We’ve had the Nest learning thermostat for a little over a year and a few things are starting to irk me, sadly. It’s definitely the most aesthetically pleasing option out there, but […] - Can’t get temperature sensors for different rooms in the UK so some rooms are blazing hot if there’s a draught near the unit
- The Home/Away Assist feature is buggy: sometimes when we wake up, the heating is off since it thinks we’re not home
[…]

A thread of the most important things I’ve learned about my job: Socialise potentially-controversial/risky ideas in 1:1 forums. Ask for and expect seething feedback. Do this in 1:1s until the idea is crisp, then bubble out to larger groups. By the time you talk to a large group about it, the idea is already cemented in people's minds.

Ok so people say that CSS is hard but those folks are usually dealing with a codebase that started with engineers who think CSS is easy & not-a-real-language.

They end up writing bad CSS that is based on hacking their way to the desired result.

CSS isn’t hard. You didn’t care. It’s easy to write bad CSS, just like it’s easy to write bad JavaScript. The difference comes in caring enough to make it good in the first place.

Here are some things I’ve learned working on design systems at big companies (Facebook, >25k employees, many hundreds of designers, thousands of engineers) and small/medium-size companies (Dropbox circa 2015, <2k employees, ~20 designers, hundreds of engineers). Some things that are easier at smaller companies:

• Adoption. You can get the whole design team—heck, the whole company—into a room to tell them they need to use the design system. POCs for products are easier to track down, and products are typically easier to adjust to the DS

At the risk of opening a can of worms, I think the reason I find coding a good skill for designers is that it forces us to describe our designs and the logic therein in a strict syntax. By extension, you can develop the same skills just by describing your designs _in writing_. Case in point: I've been thinking about layouts this week, and realising that Sketch is a poor design tool to express responsive layouts, and simply writing about the ideas (along with some psuedocode demonstrations) is taking me further than a design tool might have.

About 5 years ago I started taking learning how to write well very seriously. Not a single day goes by that I'm not glad I did.

Designers, learn how to write. It's a skill that pays dividends like no other. It's the best design tool you will ever have. Writing with clarity, brevity, and lucidity will change the way you think and speak.

How to get there is straightforward: read and write a lot.