A good Friday
It's been a long time coming, but today was the first time I’ve felt energized at the end of the week because of its events.
Start of the day
I began the day talking with Andy Budd, a co-founder of Clearleft—one of the longest standing web design agencies in the world. It's still operating and, before he stepped away from that 15+ year long project, transitioned them to an employee ownership model.
Super cool.
It was a great conversation with an Internet person that I'd never met before, who’s career I've been following since I studied in University and Twitter had just hatched from its robin-blue egg.
I hope we can work together in the future; now's just not the time.
Design Systems University
Over the past two months, I've also been participating in a book club. We've been reading Dan Mall’s Design that Scales.
Today we had our third gathering—and it was full of fun discussions. The others participating are scattered across Canada and the United States, even someone in Hawaiʻi! There are Directors of Design Systems, Design Managers, and others getting started in the design system journey.
Next week is our final gathering, where the author will join, himself, as we review the final two chapters and have a QnA with him.
Gallup Strengthsfinder
Back in 2017, I took my first Strengthsfinder assessment as part of a leadership team building activity. My top five themes at the time:
Achiever
Learner
Arranger
Context
Intellection
Now, today, the results came out quite differently:
Ideation
Intellection
Strategic
Input
Arranger
I dropped the results of both into Claude, Anthropic’s generative AI, and asked, “what happened?”
This was its response:
Overall, these shifts paint a picture of someone who has moved from being primarily focused on achievement and learning to someone who now excels in idea generation, strategic thinking, and information management.
This could indicate a career progression from a more execution-focused role to a more strategic or creative position. It also suggests that Jonathan may have developed a more reflective, big-picture approach to his work and life over the seven-year period.
Finishing my first consulting engagement
In Contracts, confidence and creativity, my 9th post in this writing practice, I wrote about writing the contract for this work.
63 days ago.
What matters is creating a fair agreement that respects both your worth and your client's needs. It's about finding balance:
between “professionalism” and flexibility;
between value and accessibility.
Give yourself permission to learn, adjust, and grow.
Then they gifted me a book—Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal.
The company is creating a first of its kind productivity tool for neurodivergent humans. I was brought on to support their transition towards the next stage of growth, starting with a design system.
Creating a design system for neurodivergents, specifically, necessitates a different level of detail. From looking at typographic theming, icon vs emoji as icons debate—landing on…use both—and long-term desire for customisability at a more extreme margin that most tools.
I learned that part of this work is also educating and working with the team on what's being done. How can I cultivate a shared language? How should we name the variables and tokens in a way that works with their Technical Founder and whoever works in it in the future?
The up front taxonomic, foundational work proved critical as the design system emerged.
As all that was going on, we also dove into onboarding flows.
How do we adapt the multi-step onboarding for humans with diverse thinking speeds and processes?
Onboarding flows are assumptively linear, but how should it adapt for non-linear thinkers?
What could we build that is inclusive of this prepositional thinking?
It's been a fun project that has asked fun questions, leading to ultimately fun work.
I signed my next contract
I'll be heading out to Colorado Springs, Colorado for the first week of October to kick off a new project with a new client.
We’ll be building something for the Space Force.
Super cool.
60 days
That's more or less how long it's been since I started my first consultation. And ALL THE THINGS have happened.
Today was a culmination of many things.
It feels good to be energized by work again.