Design Systems & Creativity

A common misconception about Design Systems is that they prohibit designers from being creative. This is far from the truth. Jina Anne, a design systems practitioner and advocate, will share her thoughts and ideas on using design systems to empower and strengthen your creativity while still keeping its goals of scale, maintainability, and efficiency at heart.

About Jina:
Jina is a consultant, community builder, and advocate focused on design systems.

She organizes Clarity, the first Design Systems conference. She founded the Design Systems Coalition and its San Francisco chapter. She created and moderates the Design Systems Slack and the Design Systems publication on Medium. She maintains the design and website for Sass. She organizes The Mixin (a Sass and front end meet up). She also curates Sass News.

She co-authored the Design Systems Handbook, Fancy Form Design, and The Art & Science of CSS. She was a tech editor for Sass for Web Designers (by Dan Cederholm) and Sexy Web Design (by Elliot Jay Stocks). She has written articles for publications including A List Apart, 24 Ways, The Pastry Box, Sitepoint, net Magazine, and Treehouse. She has keynoted DS Conf, CSS Dev Conf, and ConvergeSE, was a featured speaker at Adobe MAX, and has also spoken at events such as An Event Apart, Beyond Tellerand, Smashing Conference, and many more.

Previously, Jina was a Senior Design Systems Lead for a new, special projects team at Amazon. At Salesforce, Jina was lead designer on the Lightning Design System. At Apple, she led the CSS architecture and maintained the visual and interaction design guidelines for the Apple Online Store. She has also worked at companies including GitHub, Engine Yard, Crush + Lovely, inferno, Oden, and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Currently, Jina coaches and advises design systems teams and individuals through office hours, workshops, and limited engagements on a retainer. Through prior freelance, consulting, and pro bono engagements, she has worked on projects including W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, Mass.gov, Deloitte, and FedEx.

She has been said to be one of the most cheerful goths.