What drew you to design systems?

Growing up as a kid obsessed with LEGO and then spending several decades as a full stack designer, I've used design systems for longer than I can remember. I started contributing directly to them while publishing open source Figma accessibility annotation libraries. Then I started to figure out how accessibility gets left out of components and how annotations could help fix that.

I moved 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, web standards, performance, and user experience. These days, I help teams shift left and work more efficiently while removing access barriers for all 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, Heydon 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 (and the GitHub Annotation Toolkit), Obsidian, Ghost, Adobe CC, VS Code, browser dev tools, VoiceOver, NVDA, GitHub.