Medium Day and speaking about Design Systems!

I’m excited to be invited as a speaker for the Medium Day conference on 12 Aug 2023. If you haven’t signed up, you should totally sign up! This is my first big speaking gig, so you might think I’m a bit nervous.

Because my favorite subjects in school were ‘art’, ‘drama’, and ‘show and tell’, my only concern is being properly prepped for the presentation. Any nerves I have are about figuring out how to compress everything I’d like to communicate into 30 minutes. I typically like to say everything, everywhere, and all at once, so I’ve got some editing to do.

In 2019, I started writing on Medium about Design Systems because I wanted to share thoughts, ideas, and experiences with a wider audience. Now, four years later, I understand the practice of writing for a wider audience has increased my understanding of the subject of Design Systems in ways I never expected.

If you are a reader of Medium, consider writing on Medium! If you are not a writer, just do it anyway. Writing is the pathway to becoming an expert in any subject you are interested in. If you think you know it, it becomes a humbling experience when you try to put it into words. Sometimes, you don’t know until you write. And that is a very good thing.

Thank you Medium.com and UXCollective, and Bootcamp for everything!

Anyway, the topic I’ll be presenting is ‘How to name tokens in a design system’, which is a pretty big thing to tackle. I hope to incorporate several articles I’ve written (Typography, Colors, The Genome Color Tool, Game Logic, and naming taxonomy) together in a tight presentation, but the exact structure is TBD.

Hey, it’s my first speaking gig. What’s the worst that could happen? YOLO!