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Brad Frost: Design systems are about human relationships
01:12:48
In our conversation with Brad Frost, he shared why he thinks design systems are an enduring topic in design teams, the power of design tokens, and how AI is reshaping this space.
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- [00:02]
Brad Frost
Here's a design system, and it powers our products. That's the narrative, and it's ultimately the human relationships part of it that a lot of people don't care to admit is the real work of it. And it's like y'all aren't talking to each other at all. That's your actual problem. You all need to talk to each other.
- [00:25]
Aaron Walter
Design systems are the foundation of nearly every piece of software that we use.
- [00:31]
Eli Woolery
And no one has had a greater.
- [00:32]
Aaron Walter
Influence on the philosophy and tactics of building design systems than Brad Frost, author of Atomic Design. After helping countless companies craft design systems, Brad has come to realize that this topic is a nexus of collaboration and also of conflict.
- [00:50]
Unknown
In our conversation, Brad shared why he thinks design systems are an enduring topic in design teams. He also talked about the power of design tokens and how AI is reshaping the space. Plus, Brad filled us in on his new online course on design tokens. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [01:10]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. @ DesignBetter. Our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. And now back to the show. Brad Frost, welcome to Design Better.
- [02:01]
Brad Frost
Hey, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
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Aaron Walter
You know, some interviews, it feels like we're getting to know each other, but this is different. It's like if we had beers, it would feel normal just hanging out as friends because we've known you for a long time, and you and I, Brad, we've done a lot of traveling together. I remember a fun evening where you flew in with your wife on a helicopter in New Zealand to a very cool dinner for a conference that we were speaking at. That was pretty epic.
- [02:31]
Brad Frost
It really was. I think to this day, I don't know if I could really top flying in to a place in a helicopter. That's, I think, the best way to make an entrance. And what's even crazier is that get out of the helicopter. And was immediately handed a glass of champagne and some throwing knives.
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Unknown
Yep.
- [02:56]
Brad Frost
And I was just like, what in the absolute world is going on here? So, yeah, that was a special day.
- [03:05]
Aaron Walter
Very James Bond moment for sure.
- [03:08]
Brad Frost
And it was all like, because we were Doing a workshop. And why it happened is that to drive me would have taken a long time because it's very mountainous area in Wellington, New Zealand, and in order to drive to get me out there would have taken a lot longer. And we were running a workshop ahead of time, and they were very. The workshop has to be done at 4. Workshop has to be done at 4. They didn't alert us to the fact of our mode of transportation. They just were very adamant about the time. And I'm like, okay, okay. And usually I go over pretty frequently. No. So I was kind of. But they were serious. And then they walked me over and then say, okay, here's your ride. And.
- [03:53]
Aaron Walter
That does not incentivize you to cut it short next time around.
- [03:56]
Brad Frost
They're real. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [04:00]
Aaron Walter
So, Brad, I think at this point, everybody knows you as the guy behind Atomic Design, which is, I don't know, it's lingua franca of the software world to design web design world. You have literally traveled the world talking about design systems, helped countless teams, individuals, companies build design systems. And we want to talk shop. But let's start with kind of this new world that you're in. Your career is changing. Last year, 2024 was a year of change. Maybe you could catch us up on that and talk to us about where you're headed next.
- [04:36]
Brad Frost
Yeah, well, thank you. In a lot of ways, it's changing. In a lot of ways, it's not. I've always kind of had my fingers in a lot of pies. Is that the expression? I guess. But I've always done client services work. I've always, you know, people have paid me to make websites for 20 years now. You know, hey, we need this website made, Brad, can you do it? Yes. Yes, I can. And here's some money. Right? Like, it's a pretty straightforward endeavor and is one that's morphed and changed over time. But at the same time, that was always the contract. Right. But yeah, basically over the last couple years, I found it's not that I didn't enjoy it. I love working with teams. I love working with people and getting in there. But I felt that I could have maybe more of an impact doing other things or helping in other ways. Basically, my life's mission is to make things and to help people. And there's lots and lots of ways of accomplishing that. And as time has gone on, especially as we work with these big enterprises and organizations, I collect authenticator apps like freaking Pokemon. And it is like one of those, as most people who are employed, gainfully employed as a designer, developer or something, and you have your okta or you have your whatever it is, one of those is enough. But try having a couple dozen of those things and I got the apps on my phone to prove it. That stuff kind of becomes death by a thousand paper cuts. And also just you get a little too close sometimes. Some organizations challenges are unique to the organization and I have this like really cool perspective because I get to sort of see the broad challenges that plague many organizations irrespective of if they're a healthcare company or a financial company or a pet food company or whatever. It's like you get to kind of have this kind of different perspective. So sometimes when you're hearing about the gory details of their specific organization's problems, I'm like, I want to help you. But also it doesn't scale. So anyways, all to say is that I found myself still enjoying my work. I always find ways to be excited and to find interesting puzzles to solve and stuff. But also I just really like working with people. But at the same time I found myself going, man, I feel a little constrained by these specific activities. And so myself as well as my brother, at the beginning of this year we made a leap and we are now out on our own and we are going to be doing all sorts of things, but especially around this idea of helping people and scaling that help. We are focusing on creating these courses that are really deep dives into a lot of the stuff that we've been wrestling with and in the weeds with for the last decade. And so all of those trends, all of those hard earned lessons like we've done the reps of establishing design token systems for many, many different organizations of many different shapes and sizes. We've seen what's the same, what's different, what's a universal role versus something that's more just a preference. We've seen the infinite flavors of team dysfunction. We've seen what collaboration looks like. We've seen what the opposite of that is. We've seen what good architecture looks like. We've seen what good process looks like. We've helped model this stuff, we've helped build the stuff. And so now it's just kind of like dumping it all out and actually kind of sharing this stuff. Because again, just kind of coming back to like doing this five people at a time. As nice as it is to work with those five people, I'm just like, let's get it all out.
- [08:47]
Aaron Walter
Open the floodgates.
- [08:48]
Brad Frost
Yeah, yeah. And you're also not limited by like time and space either. That's another thing that's really fascinating to me. So we're putting this course together. So our first course is about design tokens. And what I've been doing is being able to go deep on something. I mean, you've written books and stuff like that, so you know what it's like to kind of deep, deeply research something. This is something that I probably wouldn't cover if I had a full day workshop or even a multi day workshop or a client engagement. But doing something like here's the history of themable user interfaces. Fascinating stuff because you get into like, okay, here's the first Graphical User Interfaces, 1973 Xerox. And you step through the operating systems. It's like, oh, here's like Windows 3.0 and 3.1 that like introduce this idea of like a color scheme and like all this cool stuff and then you kind of get up to where we're at in this moment in time and I love it. It's good, geeky fun, but at the same time it kind of helps frame a lot of the more sort of practical stuff that teams are wrestling with right now. It's like some of these problems are actually quite old. Super Mario Brothers, for instance, like the clouds and the bushes are the same sprite. Right. So it's like we've been creating themable little pixels for a long time. It's pretty cool.
- [10:22]
Unknown
That's a cool thing. I didn't realize that, but now thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense.
- [10:25]
Brad Frost
Yeah.
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Unknown
Brad, we want to loop back to your course in a second, but before we go to that, you mentioned your brother and I had a question around that because I have three brothers and I've worked with them in the past and it was terrible. No, no, I'm just kidding. It's actually quite fun. Two of them are developers.
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Aaron Walter
The question is, is your brother terrible?
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Unknown
Is he terrible or is he not terrible? It's easy. It's a yes, no question. We usually try to avoid those. No, I think, you know, it was wonderful in a lot of ways. Challenging in some ways, but I guess this is kind of wrapping two questions in one. But how did you think about both working with your brother and also finding the right partner? Because I think with Aaron and we've talked about this before, I feel like hopefully he feels the same way. We're very good partners in what we do and it took at least me, it took me a long time to find somebody like that that wasn't part of my family. And yeah, I guess. How do you think about that? Finding the right partner, working with your family?
- [11:20]
Brad Frost
Yeah. Ian's not awful, just for the record. And I'm only saying that because he's beside.
- [11:26]
Unknown
He's there so he can hear.
- [11:27]
Aaron Walter
He's in the room.
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Unknown
We can cut back in when he's out of the.
- [11:30]
Brad Frost
If all of a sudden you heard like, ow. Like that's. That's him punching my arm. But no, we shared a room growing up. Right. Family of five, three bedroom house, one bathroom, no lock on the door.
- [11:45]
Unknown
That's how that's similar to my childhood.
- [11:49]
Brad Frost
But so it's like when you are. I feel like that level of close. And I've seen and heard other people's sort of sibling dynamics and people are like, no way could I work with my sibling. And I get it. And so we're really lucky. But Ian was trained as a meteorologist and he was getting married and his wife was in Pittsburgh, and that's where we are based. And meteorology is a very kind of location specific job. So he was kind of on the job hunt, but it's kind of difficult. And his wedding was several months away. And I was like, when are you moving to Pittsburgh and still job searching? And said, you probably live with your wife once you get married to her. That's usually how this goes. So I said, look, I have some web stuff you could do if that would interest you or whatever, but get your feet planted over here. Continue your job search. And that was almost 10 years ago. And what's so nice about it, Eli, back to kind of having like a good partner, I think, is the amount of things you don't have to say is huge. And that's, I think, the sign of a real good partnership is the things that you just already know that they know that you don't need to double check or triple check with it as consultants and stuff. Like, you know, we have to say it all the time. You just kind of get into the habit of having to explain it. Re. Explain it and make sure you really make it abundantly clear. So the fewer words you have to speak or the fewer sort of instructions, or that there's just this kind of natural unstated understanding that I think is elevated when you're talking about someone you've known your entire life. I think that that helps with that because people will always be like, oh, Brad, how do you get so much done? And I'm like, well, I have like an extra set of hands that in A lot of ways I feel like is an extension of myself.
- [14:09]
Aaron Walter
That's really powerful. I mean, it's pretty unique. Why do you think design systems remain such a central topic in the design world? I mean, you've been talking about design systems for more than a decade. I think you came and visited my team at. When I was at Mailchimp in maybe 2012, something like that.
- [14:31]
Brad Frost
I think it would have been 2013. I actually think that you were my first, like, company workshop after I was at RGA and then I left in 2013. And I think that coming to Mailchimp was one of the first workshops that I did. So thank you.
- [14:48]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, that's wonderful. I guess I didn't realize that, but I mean, we're still talking about design systems today. They're still fascinating. What is it. What is it about them that remains such a central issue for so many different designers and design teams?
- [15:03]
Brad Frost
Yeah, it's really fascinating and it's something that we're really picking at with kind of leaning into design tokens a lot. I think that one of the things that teams continue to struggle finding the sweet spot with is what is the balance between a real pragmatic sense of let's not reinvent this wheel with. Let's create amazing user experiences for the people, our specific audience, for our specific product that's on a specific platform, that's built using a specific framework, that's built using a specific. Right. So it's really that balancing act of shared versus bespoke. And there's an innate tension there that will always be there. And maybe that's why it's not just a solved problem, is because there is this kind of push and pull, this negotiation. And where we've landed all these years later is establishing some pretty sophisticated thinking. Architecture, ecosystems, processes created a bunch of flowcharts. And I never considered myself a flowchart person, but it's just like you kind of need these architectural diagrams to show how this stuff all hangs together. Because the buzzword that is design systems continues to be this just very crude or coarse definition and you have this very coarse narrative around it. Use the design system. Well, what the hell does that actually mean? You know, so here's the design system and it powers their products, right? And like, that's the story, that's the narrative, but the reality is a lot more involved and multifaceted. And I think that it's the nuance of it, it's the mechanics of it, and it's ultimately the human relationships part of it that a lot of people don't care to admit is the real work of it. And whenever we come in and everybody's moaning or struggling with stuff and they're almost always, almost always fixated on the specific implementation and figma or encode or whatever, and they're tweaking the knobs and they're doing the thing and they're. And they're like trying to crack the code and it's like y'all aren't talking to each other at all. Like that's your actual problem. Like. Like you all need to talk to each other, but I don't want to talk to that person. So. So, Aaron, you know, do you know Mark Bolton?
- [17:57]
Aaron Walter
I do, yeah.
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Brad Frost
It's been a good many years since I've seen Mark, and if Mark happens to be listening to this, I love you and it's been a long time, but he had this thing, and this was probably 10, 12 years ago now, said the web design processes is weird and complicated because it involves people who are weird and complicated.
- [18:18]
Aaron Walter
Amen.
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Brad Frost
And like, that has always stuck out to me. And you could, you know, substitute design systems for web design there. But it's like when you're talking about what are effectively just people and culture and communication issues, it's never going to be a solved problem.
- [18:38]
Unknown
Brad, just. So we have kind of a foundation here, lots of folks listening probably understand what a design system is or have a concept of it and may also understand what design tokens are. But maybe we. You could provide kind of a concise, helpful definition of both those things, just so we're all on the same page.
- [18:57]
Brad Frost
Yeah. So I like to describe a design system as the official story of how an organization designs and builds user interfaces. And that's an interesting and maybe obtuse definition, but I feel like it works. But basically there's a few ingredients that go into telling that story. There's the kind of assets of a design system, which are the things that are the most obvious and tactile. Here is a FIGMA team library that designers can pull in that will get you your common fair components, form fields, buttons, and so on. Right. Cards. There's the corollary of that in code and whatever technologies that you have floating around your organization. And then there's kind of documentation that kind of is the instruction manual for the IKEA parts. Right. So that's the sort of assets part of it. But then the we'll say the part that we are just alluding to are the human parts, which are the more consequential bits which are the sort of people and the processes around that. So it's this kind of orchestration of assets, people and process that all kind of collectively tell a story of how an organization designs and builds digital interfaces. So that's design systems. And then as part of a design system, there are. And again, that just tends to be this very coarse word. And there's a lot of things that live under that design system umbrella. And as time goes on and what we're putting together now, and sort of revisiting this as a yet another kind of geeky sort of thing to go deep on, is the difference between a component system and a design token system. And the analogy I'll use is that of like a door. If you go to Home Depot, you buy a door, right? Probably comes in a couple styles. And do you want an oak door, right? Do you want like a semi hollow door? Are the hinges on the right or the left? But you're likely only buying that thing in white or natural wood, right? Like that's how it comes, right? So what you're buying is a structural and functional door. And that door needs to do certain things. It needs to open and it needs to close. How that door is painted or if you put black matte hardware or brass or brushed nickel hardware on the door does not impact its ability to function, right? So it's that difference between sort of the structure, the foundational and the functional pieces, and the aesthetics of it and what we've seen with design systems and this very old concept is this idea of separation of concerns, right? Used to be here's HTML does the structure, here's CSS, it does the style, here's JavaScript and it does the behavior. That's all the way back in the day. Jeffrey Zeldman designing with Web standards CSS Zengarden articulating this point, right? You could have the exact same HTML page and style it wildly differently, right? As Technology grew though, JavaScript basically ate everything and people were like, separation concerns is whack, right? Because now we just do everything in JavaScript. There's still a real utility though, to this concept. We just kind of need to redefine it a little bit where it's like there's kind of the more structural styles, the things like the hinges need to be either on the right or the left in order for this door to function. And then there's the more cosmetic esthetic factors, right? Is this door painted purple, pink, robin's egg blue or lime green? Doesn't matter, right? Like those are all decisions that have no bearing on whether this thing functions or not. So design tokens are these, like, here's the lime green door and the purple door. And, you know, this person wants this, and this other person wants this. So you create these kind of two separate tracks that unlock all sorts of possibilities and kind of create and address that tension that we talked about earlier, that between how much is shared versus how much is bespoke. Right. How much aesthetic wiggle room do you have versus, like, because you don't want to have to build a door from the ground up each and every time if you. You're like, well, I want my door to be pink, and the next person's like, I want the door to be yellow. Well, we got to go out, we got to mill some wood. We got to, like, that's waste, right? So you could build the door exactly once, and that door is sound and sturdy and accessible and all of that stuff. And then people can knock themselves out and paint it whatever color they want.
- [24:20]
Aaron Walter
So all of the configuration that you're describing here, if folks are brand new to that, they could check out something like tailwind. Tailwindcss.com which is a pretty awesome tool. And our common friend Jason Santa Maria and I, we used it a lot on some projects that we were doing for Covid Response with Africa cdc, and some US Stuff too. What do you think about tools like this? Like these frameworks, like Tailwind css? I mean, it's a very different thing than when you started talking about design systems now.
- [24:56]
Brad Frost
So the fewer words you have to speak or the fewer sort of instructions or that there's just this kind of natural, unstated understanding.
- [25:07]
Aaron Walter
There's like, you use Node js, you kind of like, plug this stuff in, and then you can just go to town building quick, beautiful, consistent, speedy, to load accessible interfaces. With a framework like this, do you shake your fist at this? Do you have critiques of it? Is it something that you've brought into companies and say, hey, here's a good starting point?
- [25:31]
Brad Frost
Yeah. Doing consulting for as long as I have, I've gotten to see seemingly every technology decision play out in organizations. And it's fascinating because I've learned how to be a little bit less judgmental. It's obviously a process. We're all human. But at the end of the day.
- [25:54]
Aaron Walter
I struggle with that.
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Brad Frost
We all do, right? Like, it's. That's the human experience.
- [25:58]
Aaron Walter
Not in my nature as a designer.
- [26:00]
Brad Frost
Boy, oh, boy. I mean, me too. And what I try to do with each and every client project. And this is. It's been a fun journey because when you're confronted with something that seems to either fly in the face of what your worldview is or what your experience is or what you know to be good, is that you just feel that defensiveness, like, bubble up inside of you. And one of the cool things I've really enjoyed about being a consultant is that it's my job to understand. I'm like, well, they're paying me to help them do the right thing, but if I just come in and say, you're doing this wrong and here's what you should be doing instead, it's not going to go well, their defenses are going to go up and all this stuff. It's been a cool journey because with things like Tailwind, like, when I first looked at it, my eyes start twitching and then I start seeing teams working with it in using it, as well as a lot of other different CSS solutions that are a bit different than how I was raised and what I'm used to, things like CSS modules, a lot of, like The CSS and JavaScript kind of frameworks, and there's, like, a lot of stuff. And just even today, it looks like literal gobbledygook. Like, when you inspect it, you know, it's just a string of just random stuff. You can't read it, but it's the matrix. Yeah, 100%. And part of me is like, that's awful, that's terrible. But on the other hand, I'm like, once I better understood, oh, here's why this is, I still come out the other end going, still a weird approach, but I at least better understand, like, what the spirit of adopting is. So coming back to Tailwind, the way that Tailwind works is you kind of are tacking on these kind of atomic styles where you basically are like, I want my sizing to be large, I want my background to be teal, I want my whatever to be whatever. And that was it. So it was almost like a little bit going back to the font tag kind of pre css. It was just like, I want my font to be size 4 and it's hard coded. Right. So back to that separation of concerns. It's like these things are no longer separate. You're literally just tacking these things on and just baking it right into your structure, right back into the door frame. You're not painting the door latch lavender. You are putting a piece of acrylic together that is just lavender through and through. So it's like there's no separation.
- [28:43]
Aaron Walter
Absolutely. Let me poke on this, though, because I try to hold multiple ideas in my head and debate both sides. I grew up in the age of web standards. Like you. I was a member of the Web Standards Project. I did a lot of work and taught a lot of students who are out there in the world building things in different companies, where I said, you got to keep your CSS separate from your JavaScript, separate from your HTML. And now, like to be working with Jason Santa Maria on a project where we're using tailwind and we're doing this. It feels like the world has flipped upside down. And yet, like, the argument that we always made was like, well, what if you wanted to change the border radius? Or what if you wanted to change the color? You could just do it right over here. Do we ever do that, though? Do we ever just say, like, hey, let's just tweak this color? Like, all the fonts, all the headings are now gonna be FF6600.
- [29:38]
Brad Frost
Yeah. Right.
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Aaron Walter
I gotta say, I don't do that very often sometimes.
- [29:43]
Brad Frost
Yep. So I think that your context matters a lot, which is also why, again, with the curiosity of kind of coming into something where it's like you're talking to specific team working on a specific project. And I think that this is really fascinating because it really picks at what it means to be a designer, and especially a designer in the context of a broader apparatus. And what I mean by that is that the individual decisions you make, design decisions. One designer's like, I like 8 pixels of border radius, and the next designer's like, I like 16 pixels of border radius. On one hand, you're like, well, you know, there's no right or wrong. But a lot of times what we tend to see in the context of your project, my understanding of it is like, this has got to get out the door fast.
- [30:37]
Aaron Walter
Correct.
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Brad Frost
We are moving quickly. Our job is not necessarily to make, like, the best, most like, branded thing. Like, this is a utility utility. This is meant to save lives. And time is of the essence. So in those cases, break glass in case of emergency, grab the bootstrap or the tailwind or the material off the shelf and go to work. That's like the perfect example of, like, when that is like, 100% the right call. The sort of different perspective that we tend to see when we go into these organizations that are supporting handfuls of dozens of hundreds of thousands of different pieces of software. If every one of those pieces of software, each one of those nodes across all these different silos are all able to make their own technology decisions and design decisions and whatever you're talking about, just exponential costs, exponential planning efforts, design efforts, engineering efforts, launch efforts, adoption efforts, maintenance efforts, and then the rebrand happens. And we're using Starbucks as an example just because everyone can picture Starbucks green in their head. Let's say Starbucks hires a new chief brand officer or chief marketing officer, and they're like, you know what? This green is tired. You know, we're purple now. Starbucks is purple, right? To roll that out to all of the different websites, touch points, apps, everything else, collateral, you're talking about millions upon millions upon millions upon million. Like, probably billions if you factor in physical stores and stuff like that, right? But, like, certainly even on the digital front, it might be approaching $1 billion. Right? And we've seen this, like, we've seen this happen again and again and again and again. So coming all the way back to things like tailwind and just kind of being like, tacking on Starbucks green on each and every, like, kind of design, property or element that you're doing to go through and make that purple is very laborious and expensive effort. And it's fraught. And there's a lot of, like, stuff that goes sideways. And again, we've been part of these a number of times.
- [33:07]
Aaron Walter
The takeaway is chief design officer at Starbucks. Let's stick with the green.
- [33:11]
Brad Frost
Stick with the green.
- [33:12]
Unknown
Stick with the green.
- [33:15]
Brad Frost
Isn't it funny? The world of like, like, branding and stuff, like the marketing geniuses, like, at any organization, all they need to do is just roll it back to, like, the saw Bass.
- [33:26]
Aaron Walter
Lucas, like, right?
- [33:28]
Brad Frost
That's, like, how you earn your keep.
- [33:33]
Aaron Walter
That's right.
- [33:34]
Brad Frost
Yeah. But. But what it really boils down to, though, and, like, why this stuff matters and kind of coming back to, like, a designer's job within the context of the organization in a developer's job within the context of the organization is really interesting. And you have these kind of competing, kind of back to this tension between what's shared and what's unique. You have, like, individual designers working on individual features of individual products, and they're incentivized and encouraged to make the best thing possible. And you multiply that for as many teams and scrum teams and products and silos as you have. This is what design systems are kind of up against, is this kind of like everyone's incentivized to just kind of put their horse blinders on and do the right thing. Right? But meanwhile, the result of that is everything's a first draft. It's not that they're all bad ideas. In fact, they're all very good ideas, but they're very good and similar, but different. When we worked with United Airlines, for instance, right, the flight block card, right? Like the flight information, which is a really critical piece of design for an airline, right?
- [34:56]
Aaron Walter
It's like the center of the business right there.
- [34:58]
Brad Frost
It truly is. It's leaving here at this time on this date. You're going to land at this time, this date at this airport. Like, that's really important. And it was the thing where the Homepage team, the Book of Flight Flow team, the manage your trip team, as well as, you know what their actual ticket design, physical ticket design and stuff were, all of those things were the same, but different. And so you're introducing a lot of opportunity for frustration for people missing their funerals, weddings and whatever, right? So on one hand, the Book of Flight designer is trying to do the best job as possible within their context, and they're incentivized to do that. The Homepage Team is doing the same. Everybody's trying to do their best within their realm, in their sphere of influence. And then there needs to be this counterbalance to that where you're basically saying, this is actually something that we want to create an organizational standard for. And this is actually a good idea for a lot of reasons. And it requires this kind of balancing act and this kind of conversation in this addressing this tension between individuals who are doing their best, but also, let's also say it, like trying to stake out their place, get that promotion, do that thing right, and to feel like you're compromising is a really hard thing for humans to do.
- [36:45]
Aaron Walter
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [36:52]
Eli Woolery
Creative people need to see and be connected to creativity that's happening in our world right now. There are amazing, inspiring people who can teach us. But how do you find them and how do you convince them to teach you? Well, lucky for us, Masterclass has done the legwork for us. I've learned so much about the creative process on their platform from folks like Frank Gehry, Herbie Hancock, Anna Wintour, Jane Goodall, Bob Iger, David Sedaris and so many more. Imagine people like that as your teachers. That's just incredible. And I just discovered that Masterclass produces these amazing documentaries, too. I watched a documentary on songwriter Diane Warren that just blew my mind. You all know her songs. They're mega hits sung by, like, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Eric Clapton. I mean, this list just Goes on for days. And seeing how her mind works, seeing her creative space, it's just like piled up with stuff and the work ethic that she has. It's fascinating. You can access masterclass on your phone, your computer, your smart TV or even in audio mode. You can just listen. Right now, as a design better listener, you can get 15% off an annual membership@masterclass.com DesignBetter Trust me, it's the best thing you're going to do for yourself this year. Get 15% off an annual membership of Masterclass@masterclass.com DesignBetter there's so much to learn. Go to masterclass.com DesignBetter to sign up now.
- [38:31]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show.
- [38:38]
Unknown
Okay, so this is a classic question, but I'm going to take it deeper. So don't worry at face value. We don't need to answer it at face value. But on LinkedIn a while back you had a post about should designers code this thing that comes up all the time.
- [38:53]
Brad Frost
Yeah.
- [38:53]
Unknown
And I really like your perspective and your answer. Talking about, you know, designers need to understand and work with the grain of the medium for what you're designing. I think that's a really nice way to put it. I relate it back to my first part of my design career where I worked on physical products and I was a design engineer, which kind of meant I was translating the industrial designers work into something that could be manufactured and made. So I had to know cad, but I didn't necessarily have to know finite element analysis, like the kind of hardcore engineering that I, that I really sucked at. I had colleagues that like, they did that work, you know, they helped me with that, but I had to kind of speak their language. At least I had to know like when something was over engineered enough that we didn't have to worry about that or when it was like, yeah, we actually need to do this work. But I imagine now, and I've been away from that world for a while, but I imagine with the tools available now and artificial intelligence, like these tools are probably doing that thing for you as you're designing. Like they're analyzing the part, they're giving you the kinds of constraints that you need to be working with. And on the digital product side, I feel like there's also this interesting blurring of the boundaries between what it means to be a designer, what it means to be a developer. And we've talked about this many times, Aaron and I, on the show and elsewhere, but I experiment with all these tools. I'm not a developer But I feel like it lets me create really quick prototypes. And we were just talking earlier today on an AMA about this tool, Replit, where you can essentially describe a site that you want to build and it will help you code it and deploy it. And from what I've heard, there are certain teams are like, skipping the Figma altogether and just going straight into Replit. And I think that's interesting. I think that's going to change the way people are working. And I'm curious how you think about it as it relates to design systems and the kinds of work that you do and teach about.
- [40:41]
Brad Frost
Yeah, no, it's great. I think that, yeah, your experience kind of working in the physical realm, you are confronted with the physics of the medium by which you're designing. And I think that my observation has been there's been a lot more digital native people who have come up by way of boot camps and programs, and people have exclusively done digital work their entire careers. But also, this is another thing I'll put on the table, is that tools like Figma have gotten good enough. And what I mean by that is that once upon a time, it's like Photoshop was it, you know? And if Aaron's designing the page in Photoshop and he needs to know how something's going to work in the browser, there are these real limitations to what these tools could actually do and articulate. And so Aaron would be forced to come over and say, hey, Brad, like, how would this work? Or whatever. I have a question about this thing and an observation that I've seen again and again and again and again and again, is that these tools have gotten to a good enough spot where designers don't have to venture outside of their comfort zone. They could spend all of their time here in this tool that they know and are comfortable in. And collaboration is relegated to a toggle switch called dev mode. And what we see is the curiosity and a lot of the other skills atrophy. And this fear sets in that these designers are going to be found out. And yet all of this is kind of happening upstream and this waterfall process just continues. Like this really unhealthy design process, in my view, in my experience, has calcified and has become the norm. And these tools have gotten to this good enough space and it leads a lot of people into this kind of. I'm going to stay inside my comfort zone. It is scary and uncomfortable to say, like, I'm not sure if I know how this actually works or how this actually gets built or how this actually does Whatever. And instead I'm just going to kind of come over here and if the developers flip the toggle switch on and if they have any concerns, then they can yell at me here. It just sets up a really unhealthy dynamic.
- [43:29]
Aaron Walter
Brad, I want to shift gears a little bit. We recently published something about ADHD and you sent us a message behind the scenes saying like, hey, thanks for posting this. Yeah, turns out I had missed that you had posted that you recently were diagnosed with adhd. I'm curious how you think about that, your ADHD and what your journey has been and sort of understanding how your brain works, where the challenges come in and maybe are there places where the way that your ADHD works, it becomes an asset for you. There's a quote that you have in your post. Mental health issues are biological phenomenon, no different than eyesight being less than 2020 and requiring glasses to correct. So the implication here is why don't we think about our brains the same way and the way our nervous system operates. What's been your experience with ADHD and how do you. Have you learned to operate with that?
- [44:26]
Brad Frost
Yeah, thanks for talking about it and for sharing it. Interestingly enough, I also just got glasses last year so that they look lovely too. Yeah, thank you.
- [44:37]
Aaron Walter
It's very on brand.
- [44:38]
Unknown
I got the sweater. The sweater and the. I don't know if that was intentional, but those are good too.
- [44:42]
Brad Frost
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all part of the bigger vision, I suppose, but it is true. And my life has literally been turned upside down because of mental health issues. Like I had to flee my home in 2020 because I had a schizophrenic neighbor who went off of his medication and began threatening my family and all of this stuff. But have all sorts of relationships with really close people in my life with varying flavors of mental health issues. Some severe, some not in all of this stuff. But it's something that I've always been kind of on the receiving end of. We'll say I've been impacted by it. I've had to sort of be a person who is kind of on the other side of it. So it's really interesting to actually enter kind of a couple phases of my life where actually I am the focus of like, mental health things. So it's like really fascinating kind of coming into it via that way, because what I've been able to experience kind of firsthand is the real effects that not taking care of mental health can do. Either tucking it away or not addressing it or not tackling it Head on or. Or being sheepish about it, or being sort of struggling with, like, whatever it is that's kind of just preventing you from being like, man, I can't see so good. I gotta go to the optometrist, right? Like, it should be that straightforward, but it's not. So whenever it became my turn to start sort of digging into it and, like, I love my wife so much for a lot of different reasons, but as I was kind of, like, going through stuff with work, kind of what we were talking about earlier, and, like, trying to get to the bottom of, like, why I'm kind of feeling a little stuck or sluggish, or I'm like, I'm not feeling like I'm able to operate the way that I would like. Turns out a lot of it was like, well, I might be doing the wrong things, which is another thing that I've been addressing. But I was also like, man, I really just, like, finding it hard to focus, get motivated, and so on and so forth. And my wife was like, you almost undoubtedly have adhd, and she does as well. And she's like, in fact, your whole family has it. And it's 100% true. My mom will change the channel of a conversation in the course of, like, 30 seconds. She'll cover a lot of territory, and I am her son, so my wife's like, you should really get that checked out. And again, because I wasn't being stubborn with it, but I was also just kind of being like, there's a lot going on. And, you know, adding yet another thing to my to do list when I'm already feeling overwhelmed was hard. But so I really thank her for her encouragement and stuff to do it. And I'm like, yeah, sure, finally do it. And when I received my diagnosis and I got my first dose of Adderall, I had the most productive day at work in probably like, five years since. Since 2020 for sure. And I was just like, oh, my God, this is amazing. So it's like a really fascinating thing, but so there's a number of things. There's a stigma around it. And I'm just like. What I'm finding is, after I sort of shared it all of these people, I got so many emails, I got so many messages from people who are like, did you guys get the same whenever you shared that?
- [48:41]
Aaron Walter
There's a fair bit of it. I mean, behind the scenes, Silicon Valley is full of ADHD and or neurodivergence of one shape or another. And that's kind of the crux of what the conversation we'd like to start around this is that there's a lot of neurodivergence in the folks that we've talked with. But if we look at a lot of the big leaders and innovators in the design and technology space, there is.
- [49:07]
Brad Frost
A strong theme, oh, 100%. I mean it's right there on the tin. Neurodivergent, like you are thinking differently. And that's what design is.
- [49:18]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, so. So here's the thing is that I did a little research and National Institute of Health did a big study that showed that about 7% of the global population has a concrete diagnosis of ADHD. And it's pretty widely acknowledged that that's a low number. So if there's such a large portion of the global population whose brain works this way, the notion of it being a disorder, it seems like a misnomer and it seems like a flawed framing. And I can't help but think that evolution is pretty good at slowly but consistently reshaping our genetic code for optimal outcomes. Why would such a large portion of the population continue to carry this forward if it weren't something of value and something useful? And because there's so many people in creative disciplines who think this way, I can't help but see a connection. Now I'm not a scientist, this is a non scientific, very speculative, you know, let's look at the things that we see in front of our eyes. And I know that some people have contacted me, very few, but a few people are like, yeah, I don't agree with your theory and that's okay. But it's just what I see. It's what I see in elementary schools, in middle schools and high schools. It's what I see in these creative professions. And to read your blog post, I'm like, oh yeah, okay, yeah, no surprise.
- [50:51]
Brad Frost
I'll take the bait on it. Cause you touched on, I think a number of really important things. So there's the disorder part of it, right, that second D in it. But more broadly, like mental health issues in general, the part where it becomes a disorder is where it starts getting in the way of your normal functioning. So if you have anxiety, anxiety is hard coded in us. This is lizard brain fight or flight or freeze. Like this is baked into us. We humans are prey animals. You know, like there are a lot of things that hunted us and we carry that for. So it's like all of our evolution, this is hard coded into us and it served us and continues to serve us. There's Very good and legit reasons to be afraid and to be cautious and to do stuff. Right. Depression. There are lots of very good and valid reasons to be sad and depressed and to feel even hopeless and things like that. Right. Like so all of these are natural biological phenomena. Like so you're like coming back and bringing that back in here. These are natural, totally natural things for any human being to experience. Right. The disorder part, the part where it crosses this threshold is when it gets in the way of your functioning. When you can't find yourself getting out of bed in the morning, or when you find yourself being an anxious mess leading up to a meeting or you can't get any sleep because of it, or in the case of ADHD where you sit down to do your work and you finish the day and you're like, what the hell did I do? I did like anything, but I was getting up the whole time. So that's the threshold to pay attention to. Because I think everything that these disorders are born from are really naturally occurring things. It's just the, we have to have honest conversations with ourselves of like, are these things present in my life more than I would like them to be and are they impacting my well being, my relationships and my just going about my daily life? If the answer is yes, you should seek treatment and there is no shame in it, there is no whatever. It's the same way again. It's, oh, my eyes are a little blurry. I gotta go get my eyes checked.
- [53:21]
Aaron Walter
Yeah. I would love it if ADHD could find a new name like Scanner Brain. Because not scatter, but scanner, like constantly scanning, scan, scan, scan, scan everything. The other type of mental process that I see in Silicon Valley is the operator. And the operators are the ones who are like super highly paid, highly compensated, respected. They are the ones who can like follow directions, checklist, kind of organize the troops and so forth. That's a really important type of person in these companies and working on this stuff. And then the scanning, scanning all the stuff, these things are disconnected, but I see these connections. Like that's super valuable. That is so valuable. If you are trying to innovate, that is the crux of innovation.
- [54:11]
Brad Frost
Yep. Like all of these things, again, these are just like naturally occurring things. They can be wielded as tools.
- [54:18]
Aaron Walter
Yes.
- [54:19]
Brad Frost
But again it's that threshold.
- [54:21]
Aaron Walter
Agreed. I think that's a really important point you bring up.
- [54:24]
Unknown
Yeah, I was just going to build on it for a second because I grew up, both my parents are psychiatrists.
- [54:28]
Brad Frost
Oh wow.
- [54:29]
Unknown
And they treated a lot of People who had, you know, very severe disorders. I was curious because, you know, you see some artists, let's say, that had something, you know, they used to call it manic depression. Now they call it bipolar disorder, where they would have these manic episodes where they're hyper creative and then they fall into a depression. You know, I asked them, like, well, if you're treating that, are you also taking away the kind of creative side of things, the creative episodes? And what they said was that kind of like what you said, Brad, is just that there comes a certain point at which this disorder is a barrier to just functioning as a normal human being. And we're trying to get to the place where it's like, you're on these medications and it's going to reign in the sort of extremes of either side of that particular episode. And at the same time, I think they also had some amount of skepticism about being feeling. Sometimes they're sort of treated like drug dispensing machines. Like when they were practicing SSRIs were very popular and I guess maybe still are to some degree. But in reality, like, depression can often maybe be even more effectively treated if you get to really regular exercise habit or spend more time outdoors. So there's things apart from drugs that can help you with some of these things.
- [55:41]
Brad Frost
100%. There's a number of things there because it's like one, there's whole different classes of drugs and whole different classes of mental health issues and stuff like this and that. There is. Yeah, when you're talking about something like bipolar type 1 or whatever, you are talking about, like, reducing the amplitude of these swings and stuff, which is what these certain classes of drugs act on, versus here's ADHD over here. And there's a couple classes, you know, the Ritalins and the Adderalls are like the two main things of that. It's really, really fascinating to see how there's such a diversity. Like, the brain is such a mystery still. And like, even these, like, wildly effective drugs and stuff. Every you ask the real professionals, like, how did these things work? And they're like, I don't know. You're like, cool, all right, great. Well, so long as people are getting relief. But like, I'll say sort of like coming back to like the ADHD thing for me and my personal experience, like, did I feel any sort of, you know, reduction in my creative capacity or my creative thinking? Far from it. Like, I think that, like, what I was able to do, the glasses analogy, is so apt. There was a big disconnect. For me between like what my brain was thinking and what I wanted to do. And like I had all of this, the ideas and stuff, never been short on those. But my ability to actualize them, to actually bring them into being, there was this big chasm in between those things that was the phenomenon that I felt was this feeling of like, man, I feel like I'm spinning my wheels or I have all these great thoughts but I can't act on them. And so the medicine for me has been like, like that feeling of being stuck or feeling like distracted where I just let sort of get sort of sidetracked by certain things. Like that went away and I was able to sit down, say I'm gonna write a thousand word blog post and not switch tabs.
- [57:51]
Aaron Walter
That's amazing.
- [57:51]
Brad Frost
The affordances of like what work that we do is like also really fascinating because there's like, it's when I'm doing like in the real world work, like physical work, like whether that's lawn work or painting or just anything like that, it's like way easier to stay on track. These machines, these user interfaces do not lend themselves to staying on track, staying focused anyways. But yeah, lots of different kinds of drugs, lots of different kinds of mental illnesses. This is why it's important to like talk to professionals and stuff like that. Because it's like everybody is different, every mind is different, even the healthiest minds. It's worth like asking these questions because like not everything is chronic or genetic or long lasting. So for instance, like when we were going through all of our crazy trauma, I got put on anti anxiety medication because like a level two stressor would hit as like a level eight stressor for me and my stomach would be distended. I felt like I was having like a heart attack and it's because my nervous system was put through a paper shredder. Is really important to just like listen to yourself, listen to your body and your mind like wherever you're at. And there's these things, these interventions, these treatments that you can have coupled with Eli, I think it's really important to say sleep, exercise, diet, nutrition, just basic good habits and relationships. There's all sorts of things that need to be considered holistically. Project Healthy Minds is a project that I've been involved in their nonprofit that helps destigmatize mental health care, get people access to mental health care as well as they work on the policy front to try to make it so that's more normalized and more sort of accounted for. And when we were putting together a resource. I helped them build a web app for people to sort of get access to. Whether that's meditation apps or whether that's like, here's how to connect with your local mental health professionals. We had a clinical advisory board who was made up of. It was like the most starstruck I've ever been on, like, zoom calls where like all these people who I read about in all the psychology books and stuff that I've read, and they were like, so thankful that so many of the resources that we were surfacing. As people come in, they're saying, I'm feeling depressed or I'm feeling anxious, or I'm feeling this way. So many of the resources were not just like, here's this pill to take or here's this psychiatrist to talk to, but it's here is sleep, here is nutrition. And these pros who have been doing this kind of work for decades, they were like, that's it right there. This is not one thing or another or this or that. It is really this all encompassing. Here are all of these things you can be doing to sort of better your well being.
- [60:59]
Aaron Walter
I love it. Thank you for talking about this, Brad. This is a super interesting topic and definitely relevant to a lot of folks. Tell us what you've been watching, listening to, reading that has you inspired and, or looking at things a little differently these days.
- [61:19]
Brad Frost
I mean, I feel like I've been looking at everything differently these days. I have been really reconnecting with my musical self for the last year and a half or two years, which has been really important at helping me in this new chapter and usher in this new chapter. Because when we're designers, we're problem solvers, right? And there's always the, what's the difference between art and design? Design, right. And we're, okay, we're doing this, we're doing these motions, we're following these processes, we're analyzing a problem and we're designing some solutions versus our artistic selves, which really involves self expression. And for me, reconnecting with my musical self has helped me in this transition in that I know that I have things inside of me that I feel compelled to get out and to share with the world. And some of those things are money making things. And we've, you know, talked about like these, like horses and stuff like this. But a lot of it has just been like this real excitement around trusting that what I kind of have inside of me that I need to get out is worth pursuing and that I've been kind of away from that for a long time and to be able to sort of like play music. And we put on a big concert in the summer called Frost of Palooza. And to have that opportunity to kind of like just put it all out there and to have this real kind of shared, elevated experience with a lot of the people I know and love, really, really special. And I think it's like really helped me understand my potential as a human being. So that's what I'm excited about because there is a lot here and there's a lot of different avenues. There's a lot of things like we could just talk about, I think here. And it used to be I'd have to go, well, I don't know how that fits in to this puzzle or this blueprint. I'm excited because I'm starting to question any container, whether that's a job, whether that's a relationship, whether that's like a hobby. Music for instance, right? I always, I would beat myself up over and over again because I'm like, man, I like really want to put out an ep. I like really want to like record some original music and publish it. And there's this thing called an EP or an album. That is what music is, right? Or I'm not playing in a band and I need to do this. And in order to call myself a musician, I need to have a band and I need to have an album or whatever, right? And I kind of feel like I shed that and I'm like, well, hang on, maybe I'll just throw a one night only concert with all of my friends who are also musicians that also don't play anymore or whatever and we'll do it that way. Or maybe I'm just going to have people over to my house once every couple months to have a music night. Or maybe I'm just going to share these doodles with my friends and text message them. Or I'm just going to share this like rough draft of a thing to SoundCloud. And maybe that's just it. And maybe I just like don't need to follow the rules anymore. Maybe those rules were silly and arbitrary to begin with. And I'm starting to apply that same mentality that I gave myself permission to do in music to my career. And I think that that's really cool because like, what happens when it's no longer Brad, you need to convince people to pay you to make them a website. What if that was like only one avenue for operating in the world? And what happens if that was Like a fallacy or that wasn't true. And what happens whenever you just kind of give yourself permission to explore any.
- [65:50]
Aaron Walter
And all things, that's a great transition to where can people learn more about your course? And I believe you have a special discount to offer Design better listeners.
- [66:02]
Brad Frost
Yeah. Yeah. So it's designtokens course.com. that's where you could find it. My brother and I made the website and you could see design tokens in action. There's a little theme switcher, so you could switch between like a dark theme and then a papyrus and comic Sans themes. And the coupon code is designed better, is awesome and it'll get you 20% off of the price. And right now where we're at. So we are doing this iteratively and I'm like so excited about this. I did this with my book with Atomic Design. I kind of wrote it in the open and basically like, I kind of had this like rolling thing. But unlike a book where that needs to go to print and that's ultimately final with this course, it's like as we upload the videos, they're there and we could kind of just keep tacking them on along the way. So right now what we've done is we've opened the door to pre orders so people could come along the ride with us. We have like two hours of content full of a bunch of like, here's the main gist of things, some of the main takeaways as well as we have like a bunch of homework for people to do while they're waiting for the full course to be developed. So we're like, go Talk to your DevOps people to figure out how you deploy this stuff, because that's the stuff that ends up taking four months. So we've got lots of tips and things like actionable steps people can do. But then we're basically going to be knocking out these chapters and uploading them along the way and having a grand old time along the way.
- [67:39]
Aaron Walter
That's great. Brad, thank you so much for sharing your story and for putting this course together. I mean, who else but you and Ian could put together something so comprehensive and like, really grounded in real world experience?
- [67:55]
Unknown
Also, real quick, just an asterisk on the promo code. We did not force you to say design better is awesome, but we're fully behind that. Thank you.
- [68:03]
Brad Frost
Hey, no, seriously, thank you guys. Like, I mean, I'm usually doing a lot of stuff, as a lot of people are, but like your newsletter, I love everything that you all do. That is a true statement. That coupon code. Fantastic.
- [68:17]
Aaron Walter
Thank you. Well, Brad, thank you so much for being on the show.
- [68:21]
Brad Frost
Yeah, thanks for having me. This is great.
- [68:28]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.