Rosetta design system

The challenge

Handshake's design team only started growing in size & maturity in 2022 – the year I also joined, and 9 years after it was founded.

Mountains of tech & design debt meant that the company's design system, Rosetta, had seen a few failed attempts at gaining traction over the years, had limited component support & very little documentation, and overall needed a lot of love.

Since joining the design systems team, I've markedly matured the practice – from pixel pushing to making new processes to improving documentation – and most importantly have fostered better ways of building software throughout the company.

Global navigation revamp

Our global side navigation had never received much attention despite its prominence throughout our student product. We continued adding new product areas without thinking holistically about our navigation system.

I proposed and led a project to update the sidenav with consumer-grade polish and to support the addition of new product areas.

Comprehensive design documentation

Documentation should be one of the key ways a product org interfaces with a design system; it scales and communicates decisions in a way that would otherwise be incredibly manual.

When I joined Handshake, none of our components had any design documentation. Over time I created and socialized documentation that drastically reduced the number of ad-hoc questions posed by designers and engineers.

Improving design token management

I worked closely with an engineer to implement Tokens Studio into our core token management workflow, which allows the design systems team to create and edit tokens directly in our codebase.

The result: changes to tokens like color, spacing, border radius, shadow & more can be directly updated in code by a designer, freeing up engineers to spend time on more important work.

This work also enabled me to upgrade our Figma libraries with Variables, giving designers access to the most up-to-date token values available in code.

Design system governance, contribution, & working models

As lead on the design systems team, I collaborated with Directors and senior management across design, product, and eng to define clear processes for governance, contribution, and general working models at Handshake. I helped present it to squads across the company, including design & engineering all hands meetings.

The outcome: team alignment on 'how we do things' means that everyone has a shared approach. In many cases, the new process resolves questions around DS governance and contribution before (or quickly after) they come up.

These are just a few of the design systems & platform projects I've worked on.

My experience ranges from creating new systems from scratch and increasing adoption, detailed work on typography, color, and iconography, designing and updating components, and more. I'd be delighted to discuss any and all of this work in more detail.