Claim OwnershipPatterns Podcast
Subscribed: 182Played: 3,259
Subscribe
© 2026 Patterns Podcast
Description
Welcome to the Patterns Podcast. Each episode we sit down with the leaders and builders defining how modern digital products come to life. From systems and tools to culture and decision making, we dig into what’s driving real impact today and shaping the future of how teams build.
140 Episodes
Reverse
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. In the pilot episode of the Design Systems Podcast, host Chris Strahl talks with Evan Lovely about design systems as a whole. What are they? Who are they meant for? What are the benefits? And more. Evan Lovely CTO and Co-Founder, Basalt and Knapsack Evan is the CTO of Basalt. His pragmatism and craftsmanship are contagious within project teams. He believes that encouraging creativity, tinkering, and close collaboration leads to the most elegant solut...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris and Emily Campbell discuss the convergence of design and code, and what that actually looks like. They walk through what a designer role looks like in a modern digital product team and Emily explains her idea that design and development are the same. They just have different approaches to the same process or medium. Other topics the duo touch on include questioning if designers should learn to code, intent around design and development, the impo...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Dan Mall calls in from the East coast to chat with Chris about design systems and their role in enterprise organizations. How does this affect the teams that work on them? The guys also discuss what digital products actually are in relation to design systems. How to create a "one ring to rule them all" type of system and does that even exits? They continue to dive into agile, designers' roles, how teams are finding they're wasting time, and much more. ...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris talks with Tatiana Mac about ensuring design systems, specifically components, are accessible. The two discuss accessibility testing tools, being sure to be inclusive in forms, considering inclusion and the "why" when asking for certain data, and more inclusion topics. Download the episode transcript: https://files.basalt.io.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast_transcripts/005-Design-Systems-Podcast-Transcript.pdf Tatiana Mac Independent American designer...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris chats with Marco Suárez about his design experiences in the early days, before the term 'design systems' was official. The two walk through how to drive adoption of a design system within an organization, using branding and design in a physical space as well as digital, Marco's specific design experience and working with companies like MailChimp and Etsy on design systems, and more. Download the episode transcript: https://files.basalt.io.s3.ama...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris talks to the President and CEO of the Technology Association of Oregon (TAO), Skip Newberry. While Skip may not work in the DS community day-to-day, he has a unique view on design and development from working with so many Oregon tech companies. The two talk about focusing on the use of design when helping to reach communities outside of the standard spectrum. Additionally, they discuss the idea of how ubiquity matters, to reach the most people, l...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris talks with Salem about what a front-end architect actually does, they breakdown of web components (what they are and who uses them), cover the tools Pega systems use and how their team works, and much more. Download the episode transcript: http://files.basalt.io.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast_transcripts/008-Design-Systems-Podcast-Transcript.pdf Salem Ghoweri Lead Front-End Architect for PegaSystem's Bold Design System Salem is the lead front-en...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris and Charles Hall talk about the impact of accessibility, how to build more accessible products, and the role design systems play in creating accessible outcomes. Guest: Charles Hall is a Senior UX Architect at MRM and an Invited Expert of the W3C Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. You can find Charles on Twitter and LinkedIn. Host: Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of Knapsack, DnD DM, and occasional river guide. You can find Chris on T...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris and Jeremy Keith discuss imbuing teams with a shared sense of ownership of their design system, creating design systems able to address unforeseen scenarios, design ops as an essential part of an effective design system, and more. Guest: Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer working with @Clearleft, playing music with @SalterCane, creator of @Huffduffer. You can find Jeremy on Twitter and LinkedIn. Host: Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris talks with Brad Frost and Evan Lovely about why code is the real source of truth, how to bring designers and developers together around the code, and the opportunity design systems provide for designers to focus on creative contribution rather than producing more comps. Guests: Brad Frost is a web designer, speaker, writer, consultant, and musician in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. Author of Atomic Design. You can find Brad on Twitter and LinkedIn. ...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris and Ethan discuss the parallels between design systems and responsive web design in terms of the impact on how teams design/develop digital products, creating a shared language and research as a means to build successful design systems, and where design systems are headed in the years to come. Guest: Ethan Marcotte is an independent web designer, writer, and speaker, and the fellow who started that “responsive web design” thing. You can find Et...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Chris and Micah discuss creating a singular design system that scales to support a massive app ecosystem, using tokens to align design across disparate products, and transitioning from individual teams working on many products to one company working on a library of products. Guest: Micah Godbolt is a design systems advocate, speaker, trainer, and writer. Micah is a software engineer for Fluent UI at Microsoft and author of Frontend Architecture for D...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Mina Markham (currently at Slack, formerly at Hillary For America and IBM) and Chris discuss getting executive buy-in, how to create space to continue advancing your design system, going beyond a shared language by building a shared culture, the story behind the Pantsuit Design System, and Beyoncé, of course. Guest: Mina Markham is Staff Engineer at Slack, design systems advocate, and international speaker. You can find Mina at mina.codes, on T...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Stephen Gates (currently at InVision; formerly at Citi and Starwood) and Chris discuss advice for leaders needing to drive adoption and success of their design systems, how to assess and foster trust between design system creators and consumers, treating design systems as infrastructure, and the Amazing Design People List to help designers find work during COVID-19. Guest: Stephen Gates is Head Design Evangelist at InVision, host of The Crazy One pod...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Adam Argyle and Chris venture into “spicy opinion” territory and discuss when design systems are freeing vs. constraining, creating appropriate “offramps” for venturing outside of your design system, why designers ought to be proposing changes to code (aka making pull requests!), and decentralizing the human side of design systems to break down silos and enable innovation and enhancements to spread freely throughout your product teams. Guest: Adam Ar...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Varun Vachar and Chris discuss the “design graph,” creating choice in governance models, building a foundation of tools when setting up new systems, and using computational design and machine learning with design systems. Varun was at Rangle when this episode was recorded but is now at Chromatic. Guest: Varun Vachar is a Developer Experience Engineer at Chromatic, formerly Director of Technology at Rangle, and generative art enthusiast. You can find ...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Jason Lengstorf and Chris discuss failure, self-doubt, and ultimately finding your way before switching gears and getting into designs systems, communicating the things that make teams want to adopt design systems, and an approach for broadening and deepening your experience with the technologies your system may benefit from. Guest: Jason Lengstorf is a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify, host of Learn With Jason, and writer. You can ...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Morgane and Chris discuss threading design into the fabric of how business works, capturing a wide range of complexity needs within your design system, moving away from traditional design tools to providing a playground that enables anyone to design with code in the browser, lessons from game development and how they apply to design systems. Guest: Morgane Peng is Design Director at Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking, illustrator, sp...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Rick and Chris discuss deputizing evangelists to drive adoption and reduce fragmentation, contribution models and thinking about the areas to own vs. areas to share ownership vs. areas to give up ownership, using design systems to share innovation across teams, measuring design system efficacy, and more. Guest: Rick Rodriguez is Head of Design Systems at Walmart Labs, an avid runner, hand letterer and superfan of cappuccinos and donut breaks. You can...
Send us feedback or episode suggestions. Jina and Chris discuss the inception of design tokens and Theo during Jina’s time at Salesforce, the correlation between design systems and community building, shared ownership instead of governance, why “design systems are not a thing,” and more. Guest: Jina Anne is the Founder of Clarity, Creator of design.systems, and Co-Chair at Design Tokens W3C Community Group. You can find Jina at jina.design, on Twitter as @jina, and on LinkedIn. Host: Chr...
Comments
Download from Google Play
Download from App Store
United States