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style guides? At last, I get it! The Informal PitchĪround mid-December – freshly returned from Clarity Conf (stay tuned for a blog post of notes!) – I met with the head of PMC’s product department, let’s call her J. After the conference and conversations at Clarity, the aspects of my work where I felt lost or unsure of myself, I now feel confidence and, well, clarity.ĭesign systems vs. I took away so much valuable information from both Nathan’s workshop and the conference, but I must say the biggest takeaway was…wait for it… clarity. Major props to Jina Anne for putting together such a fantastic conference and community. What can I say? I was in a room of 600 people that not only understood exactly what I do, they were doing basically the same things at similarly sized companies! I am at the beginning of my design systems journey, and it was so, so cool, inspiring, and validating to talk to other designers and developers that had been in my position a couple of years ago. And here’s the obligatory link to PMC’s job openings 🙃.Īnyway…back to Clarity Conf. My employer is investing in me! This conference, in particular, really shows that PMC is on board with all of the new things I am introducing. I’d been self-employed for basically all of my career until PMC, and assembling an expense report for reimbursement was novel and, um, great. While it might be a given that an employers to pay for a conference or two, this is new to me. PMC paid for my conference ticket, travel, and the workshop “Design Systems at Scale” with Nathan Curtis!!! Right after I found out about the new plan for Cantaloupe, I was heading to Clarity Conf in New York City, a conference all about design systems. The timing for all of this was so perfect. PMC decided to do the Cantaloupe redesign in house and I would be leading the front-end!!!! Now that’s a milestone!!! Clarity Conf While I’d already completed a lot to include – CSS architecture and naming conventions and a core webpack configuration – there was a lot I still needed to figure out, most notably: sharing markup between the theme and pattern library, storing centralized SCSS and JS (and determining what should be centralized), and how the heck to set that up for success on a project I wouldn’t be directly involved with. First of all, it was an exciting milestone to be included in this early conversation, and secondly, somewhat panic inducing. Over time, this has resulted in very “snowflake-y” front-ends that are difficult to work with.įor the Cantaloupe redesign RFP, I was asked to contribute requirements for front-end.

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Traditionally, these were mostly back-end requirements – PMC has a wealth of back-end “core tech”, or a host of WordPress plugins for sharing back-end and structural code – and the front-end implementation was left up to the agency.

The technical requirements give the bidding agencies an relatively clear idea for the scope of the project. Once the designs are mostly complete, technical requirements are assembled in an RFP (Request for Proposal) that is then sent out to a handful of agencies PMC has worked with in the past. Right when I started, PMC was finishing up the redesign of with XWP, a leading WordPress VIP agency. Traditionally, PMC has brought on agencies to do large redesigns. I’m not sure if it’s okay to reveal the brand, so for the purposes of this blog post, we will call it Cantaloupe. One of PMC’s larger brands has had a redesign in the design and planning phase for quite some time. No time for a recap of last month’s installment of the Chronicles. I expected to have to do more convincing and pitching, but nope! PMC gets it.

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I’ve been meeting with the design team for a while now, and they have been on board, but working in a systems-oriented way is a big shift in mentality for how to handle engineering and the project management workflow. It’s been an exciting process! And I must say, there has been much less friction than I anticipated in getting to step 3.

Show that it’s useful (I guess people liked it!).

Make a thing (for PMC, the IndieWire pattern library).

Design systems are now a thing at PMC! And all because I followed Brad Frost’s three simple steps for starting a design system at a big company: Wow! Lots has come together over the past month. Written in Haste), but more like Wi MH, i.e. Written in Major Haste. Literally, I sat down at a coffee shop 4 hours ago and this is what happened! No editing! Okay, bye, and happy reading. Note: Similar to last month, this installment of Designgineering Chronicles is not only WiH (i.e.