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© 2025 On Theme: Design Systems in Depth
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Exploring how successful design systems get built, maintained, and deliver impact for their product teams. Go deeper than tokens and get more detailed than "it depends". Expect aha moments, actionable insights, thoughtful discussions, and spicy takes from accomplished design system practitioners. Hosted by Elyse Holladay.
21 Episodes
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📲 Text the show your thoughts! Surprise minisode! In this quick episode, hear a few ways AI tools are useful for design systems now, my new favorite design-eng handoff tool, and three can't-miss industry events this fall.
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Chat, this is the last episode of season one! Thank you for listening and supporting the show! There's no better way to wrap up, IMO, than an optimistic and curious exploration of what it means to be a creative human in an increasingly technological world. So to wrap up season one, Natalya Shelburne joins me to explore how design leaders can cultivate creativity in an era of rapid technological and organizational change. Drawing from her degree and research in c...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Y’all, I’ll be honest. Some days, I’m scared and nervous and uncomfortable with AI’s emergence, and implications, too. But I am also curiously optimistic, and more importantly — I don’t want to use any platform I have to spread even more fear and discontent and drama. So today you’re getting a dose of two things that I love: infrastructure and optimism. Drawing from his experience leading design systems at three very large orgs, Sam Anderson from Intuit shares h...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Guy Segal joins Elyse to unpack the messy, complicated world of… people. Guy shares practical strategies from his experience at Thomson Reuters, including the powerful "pre-mortem" exercise he used to rebuild trust and alignment for the design system. They get vulnerable and unpack why (as cliche as it sounds!) genuine listening, storytelling, learning to give and receive feedback, and actively engaging with product teams, is so much more impactful than relying ...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Ben Callahan joins Elyse for a fun conversation on creating impact with design systems. Ben shares insights from his consulting experience, discussing common pitfalls like organizations expecting a design system without adequately supporting their teams. They break down the "Four Quadrants of Design System Impact" framework, which breaks down tactical versus strategic work, helping teams avoid pitfalls like endless component creation. Plus, hear Ben’s prediction...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Marcela Rodriguez Joos shares the story behind the One UPS project, a massive effort to modernize and unify UPS’ brand and digital experiences through a new design system. Marcela reveals how a “why does everything look different?” moment from their CEO was the catalyst for this ambitious effort, how they’re collaborating across a massive org, and successfully reducing development timelines from years down to months. Plus, Marcela’s team dishes out their design ...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Ever had a team come to you after an a11y audit like, "but I used the design system, why does my product have accessibility defects??" Daniel Henderson-Ede, one of design systems' leading accessibility voices, joins me on the show today to unpack a spicy myth in design systems: that accessibility can be fully "built-in." Daniel walks us through the common pitfalls of overselling accessibility, how teams often mistakenly assume the system handles everything, and ...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! This one’s a little bit different than some of the projects and topics that we've had on the podcast so far — we’re talking about starting a new role. I think it's one of the hardest things that we do sometimes as design system practitioners, because the design system is really about changing your organization, changing the way we build UI, and so there's a lot of weight on your shoulders when you come into a new role. Starting a new job as a design system pract...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Design systems aren’t just about components—they’re about how teams work together to build better UI. Jeff Pelletier, a frontend engineer with a design background, joins the show to talk about feature workflows for design systems, how design and engineering can work in parallel, and why documentation should be part of the process, not an afterthought. Jeff and Elyse dive into how to create API-first component specs, the challenge of design-code parity, and the ~...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Spotify’s ad platform just got a serious glow-up, and Smith and Tyce are here to tell us how they pulled it off. Smith Schwartz, Product Design Manager, and Tyce Clee, Engineering Manager, walk us through the redesign of Spotify Ads Manager—why it was needed, how they used design systems to make it happen, and what it took to get buy-in. Smith and Tyce tell us about the shift from a playful UI to a more data-dense, enterprise-friendly experience, how their local...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Adriana Morales from HEB (aka the best grocery store) poses a tricky question for the show: what happens when your design system can't support all your products, or your flagship product? Hashtag enterprise organization problems. Adriana and I explore some of the scenarios where this might occur, the "system of systems" concept, product team autonomy, and pace layers. Don't miss Adriana's explanation of her "ways of working" workshops and thoughts on creating em...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! I invited Beau to the podcast because of his great Medium articles on design systems... but he's not working on a system team right now! Beau shares his experiences on both sides of the—fence? aisle?—and the lessons he's taken away. We chat about the tradeoffs of building for speed vs stability, bringing new designs for AI products into the system, onboarding, cross-team empathy, and why we're always complaining about the other side. Plus, find out what Beau wan...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! ToniAnn joins the show to share her experience building a multi-brand design system for BetMGM and Entain's joint venture. This episode is our first project deep dive and it's full of legacy codebases, lessons learned, and big wins. ToniAnn talks to us about dealing with ambiguity, owning your decisions, and keeping leadership on board as you ship a system that changes the way your business works—and your partners businesses, too. 💖 On Theme is a brand new podca...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! If the way we're building design systems has a fatal flaw, it's "waiting for enough investment to get it right." In this episode, Brian teaches us to not wait for permission and how your product teams' success is your success. Brian reminds us how important it is to remember that we're all on the same team, building the same product—and why internal politics and storytelling matters way more than components. Plus, why design systems are like toilets (not a Dad j...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! I'm thrilled to have the one and only Dan Mall on the show, and in this episode, we get deep into all the things you maybe don't want to do if you want your design system to be successful. Dan shares his experiences with failed design systems, one very failed attempt at pitching a system to leadership, why he thinks design systems should be specific not generic and maybe... not include foundations? Plus, we talk about useless documentation, what's next for...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! You can't talk about design systems lately without addressing the elephant in the room: layoffs. Noelle walks us through her experience of multiple layoffs in one year, why 2023 was so different than 2020, and how the success criteria of design systems correlated with team layoffs. We discuss the bogeyman of "getting zero results from your design system" and what Noelle was hearing from business leadership about that, and how storytelling might matter more than ...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Jina Anne gives us a history of the journey from early style guides to widespread industry adoption of design systems, and the challenges and successes. We explore how tokens came to be, how it feels when the engineering team just starts using your work before it's ready, the separation of HTML/CSS/JS concerns, and how ClarityConf got started. Plus, the origin of the phrase "design systems" (maybe?), and what the NASA Graphic Standards Manual has to do wit...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Brad Frost takes us back in time to the early days of design systems, and walks us through some of the significant moments of evolution from style guides to modern design systems. We dig in to the multiple proto-Storybook-esque projects, the original problem of sharing UI patterns, what React did, and Brad's personal moment of "oh, it's called design systems now." Plus, a bonus podcast throwback from the Style Guides Podcast feat. Dave Rupert and some early prot...
📲 Text the show your thoughts! Elyse shares five predictions for design systems in 2025 and beyond in the second pre-season minisode. Text the show to share your thoughts and predictions and maybe even be featured in a future minisode! Early Bird tickets are available until January 15th for Into Design System's excellent annual virtual conference, featuring Nathan Curtis, Romina Kavcic, Cintia Romero, and more. Get your tickets now before prices go up at intodesignsystems.com/ontheme
1📲 Text the show your thoughts! Are design systems in the trough of disillusionment? Elyse explores the past decade of design systems and what we're missing in this pre-season one minisode.
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