I've known design systems were the answer since before most people were calling them that.
It was 2013, maybe 2014 — Event Apart in Austin. I sat through a talk on Style Tiles and something clicked. Not just as a design methodology, but as an organizational one. Here was a way to stop redefining the same things over and over, to close the gap between what design intended and what development delivered, to make "digital first" mean something beyond a slide in a deck.
Build tools, not rules.
Around 2017 I was at Delight Conference in Portland when I heard Dan Mall speak for the first time. If Style Tiles gave me the idea, Dan gave me the framework — and more importantly, the philosophy. That line reoriented how I thought about what a design system actually is. Not a governance document. Not a constraint. A gift to the people building alongside you.
For years, converting Leapfrog — our 2008 design language — to Vision was like painting a house one brushstroke at a time while someone kept adding rooms. Requests piled up. Timelines stretched. We were moving slowly and inconsistently, and everyone on the ground felt it.
So I started with my manager. He'd been a UX designer himself, which helped — he didn't need a long explanation. He got it. From there it was our director, then the brand director. Each conversation was a rung.
Eventually I made the case plainly: give me the space to try to fix this. He was supportive — and while the business realities meant he couldn't hand me a team or a budget, he gave me what he could: permission to spend part of my time on it.
That was enough. For a while, that had to be.