Hello from Seattle!

It has been *so cold* the past month, and I’m not kidding about the bone-chilling winds and the rain that has been kissed by the Arctic. But somehow the flowers push through and bloom, and although I’m still using the fireplace daily there’s hope behind the clouds because when the sun comes out almost all articles of clothing come off! I took this video 2 weeks ago while walking my dog, and to be honest, I was more optimistic about the rain then when I thought it would abate and it just hasn’t stopped.

Chocolate Time

I finally made it over to Spinnaker Chocolate in my neighborhood. The owners are into sailing (go figure from the logo!) and make expensive but very high quality bars of chocolate.

This is chocolate for the indulgent splurge, but very high quality. I talked to a woman in the shop named Emily, who was very friendly and was open to my trying all of the itty delicious samples.

Design Systems and Gardening

I watched a couple of presentations from the Figma Config2022 conference, and the standout for me was a talk by José Torre called “Design Systems are Flawed”. José compared a good design system to a garden:

“Rather than approaching design systems like architecture, we should approach it like gardening.
An architect designs a structure considering every single detail, but once they’re done, they move on to the next one.
A gardener plants seeds and tends to them. They know what they planted, but they don’t know exactly what the garden is going to look like.”

His talk used different illustrations, but was very similar to the linked article. A lot of this is common sense, but I always appreciate the perspective from an experienced professional that knowledge and skills are more important that the tools used.

I haven’t used Shopify in over 3 years, so this presentation also introduced me to Polaris, a design system for customizing your shop’s UX for your customers. Sounds interesting.

the Punk Lady Apple

Our Endless Early Spring