Let’s work together.

Christine Bath and I were brought in to help the team define a new design system for the City. As with most design systems projects, it began with close, careful research: we interviewed staff members and teams across City government, working to understand how a new design system needed to fit into upcoming initiatives. We also led a series of workshops and presentations at the City, describing how a new design system could support a better way of working.

Equipped with our research, Christine and I delivered a “version zero” starter kit for the Digital Service team. We created a Figma library of core components and tokens, and stood up a documentation site for the team to carry into their first pilot project. We also delivered our research findings, a high-level roadmap, and recommended next steps.

Throughout it all we worked closely with the Digital Service team, reviewing in-progress work and coauthoring deliverables with them. We wanted to ensure our work was something they’d be excited to inherit, shape, and sustain; I can’t wait to see where they take their design system next.

Unbreaking’s cofounders have experience in journalism, mutual aid, and technology, not to mention large-scale volunteer-powered documentation projects. I was asked to join the project early on, and worked with the team to create Unbreaking’s brand, and to design and launch its site.

In the months since launch, I’ve iterated on the design to match Unbreaking’s rapidly evolving product needs. As the project’s coverage has grown, we’ve added new features like timelines and launched the blog, with more on the way. It’s a tremendous project, and it’s been a rare privilege to contribute to it.

In 2024 I joined 18F, the digital services team that worked to improve the way the federal government built and procured software. Shortly after onboarding, I was asked to help out on the Cloud.gov Dashboard redesign, which was already a few months underway.

My first priority was building alignment. I met with key stakeholders and partners on the Cloud.gov team, then held a few workshop sessions to define a set of design principles for the project  —  principles that reflected how Cloud.gov talked about “good” design as an organization. From there, I led a series of design explorations for the new Dashboard, using the team’s existing prototypes as a foundation. We adopted a “test and learn” mentality throughout, leveraging Cloud.gov’s subject matter experts and its users to review and refine our design work.

Visually, my designs were shaped by the United States Web Design System. But we realized early on that certain features didn’t exist in the USWDS; additionally, the Dashboard required denser, more transactional workflows than the design system offered. The work I delivered aimed to thoughtfully extend USWDS, while still feeling “of a part” with the country’s design system.

None of this could have happened without the team  —  which was, in a word, tremendous. I worked alongside Jess Dussault, Eleni Chappen, Claire Annan, Boon Sheridan, and Laura Poncé, and I’m grateful I got to see some of the best members of 18F’s engineering and research divisions do their work.

Editorially was the first time I was able to translate what I knew about responsive design to a non-editorial product. It presented a unique challenge: how do you create a complex, feature-rich application in a browser, and make it feel not just usable but beautiful on any screen?

Better artifacts weren’t the answer: a highly collaborative design process was. Jason, Mandy, David, and I moved between high-fidelity mockups and rough prototypes, and sharpened our product requirements as we saw how features performed across different devices. We met with users to get feedback on early designs, and fed those back into the product.

While I moved into an advisory role in 2014, to this day I’m proud to have been a small part of this team. Together, we built a stunning, intuitive product, one that let you pick up the device closest to you, open a browser, and get to writing —regardless of the size of your screen.

To launch a site of this scale, I worked alongside Filament Group and Upstatement, two agencies hired by the Globe, as well as Miranda Mulligan, the Globe’s design director. We immediately established a regular cadence for project-wide design reviews, where design concepts and prototypes alike were reviewed by the entire team, and iterated on collaboratively. We also worked through challenges the industry hadn’t yet tackled, like responsive strategies for complex navigation structures, and how best to handle advertising across different viewports. This project  —  and the team responsible for it  —  was groundbreaking, and I’m proud to have been a part of it.

I worked closely with Greg Storey throughout, establishing a direction that felt like a more modern iteration of the site’s existing aesthetic. I also happened upon a new method for creating complex yet flexible layouts, which eventually turned into the foundation of responsive design.