What drew you to design systems?

As a full stack designer for several decades and as a kid who grew up obsessed with LEGO sets, I've used design systems for longer than I can remember. I began contributing directly to them while creating accessibility annotatation libraries in Figma.

I got into the accessibility field because the technical sweetness of a delightful interface doesn't sustain one's passion forever. There are few fields with more depth and greater impact than accessibility because it sits at the intersection of identity, the law, human rights, and web standards. These days, I help teams shift left and work more efficiently while removing access barriers for users. Design systems are a big part of doing that at scale.

Who have you learned from or been inspired by?

Every single person on this team, as well as the now-disbanded CVS Health Inclusive Design team. A few others off the top of my head are Anna E Cook, Sara Soueidan, Andy Bell, Haydon Pickering, Scott O'Hara, Adrian Roselli, Soren Hamby, Josh Kim, Jennifer Zhang, Shell Little, Caitlyn Mayers, and Tatiana Mac. There are many others and I could drop names all day because this field is full of passionate and generous people who are eager to help.

Favorite tools

Figma, Github's Annotation Toolkit, Obsidian, Hemingway, Ghost, TickTick, VS Code, DevTools, GitHub.