A weekday live show: candid design talk, new approaches, and the occasional spicy hot take with guests from the community.
I regularly speak at conferences and on podcasts, panels, and live shows about design systems, design tokens, and theming. Here's a collection of my talks and appearances.
36 talks · 8 conferences
A UXDX panel, moderated by Jim Morris with Alexander Wilson, debating where design systems are headed as AI generates more of the interface layer: from component libraries to the rules, constraints, and infrastructure behind dynamic experiences.
A Long Island Technologist meetup host presentation with Michael Rispoli on agentic development within design systems.
A UX Days 2026 talk for the University of Illinois arguing that constraints, including design systems, unlock richer, more focused creativity rather than limiting it.
A Cause of a Kind 'Stand Up' conversation with hosts Mike Rispoli and Justin Abrams on building trustworthy products: keeping design systems coherent as products scale, the marketplace-of-components idea, and why functionality has to come before aesthetics.
A Design Engineering Meetup talk at Datadog on typographic fundamentals for the web: the mathematical relationships between letter spacing, font size, line height, and line length, and bringing them into CSS, because just because we can doesn't mean we should.
Converge 2025 talk arguing that constraints, including design systems, unlock richer, more focused creativity rather than limiting it.
A panel at Knapsack's Patterns event in New York on building meaningfully with AI: where it creates real value, what foundations make adoption sustainable, how design systems evolve when interfaces become generative, and what must stay human when AI can generate anything.
A Craft Across panel by Infa.ai with Brad Frost, Samantha Gordashko, and Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent on the future of design tokens: standardization and token bloat, keeping documentation current, AI's impact, and the tools shaping token workflows.
A UX Engineering Meetup talk in NYC, hosted by Chromatic (Storybook) and Betterment, on design tokens from a developer's perspective: how to think about them, name them, and wire them into the code that ships.
A Knapsack 'Talking Tokens' webinar with Jackie Lai (Dow Jones) and Miranda Bouck (Instacart) on token governance and adoption at scale: who owns tokens, how to name them, building from scratch vs. retrofitting, and how AI might reshape token work.
An Inspect & Reflect session by Infa.ai reviewing the Nord design system with Maya Hampton, Davy Fung, Beatriz Martín Martins, and Alexander Wilson: layout components, naming conventions, props vs. slots, and balancing flexibility with consistency.
An Inspect & Reflect panel by Infa.ai reviewing Adobe's Spectrum design system with Guy Segal, Marta Conde, and Francis Thibault: alert banners, search fields, naming conventions, accessibility, and design tokens across products.
A JPMorganChase panel discussion where experts shared their experiences and tips on creating effective design systems in terms of content variants, taxonomy of elements, and optimizing for findability.
A lightning talk at the SmashingConf New York 2024 Jam Session, hosted at Figma, on the terminology behind components and why shared units of measurement let teams compare usage and success across systems.
An interview in The Design Annotation LIVE community series with Donnie, founder of Design Systems House, on his journey into design systems, the day-to-day at Design Systems House, and where design systems and AI are heading.
Episode 032 of Ben Callahan's The Question, co-hosted by Donnie D'Amato, working live through the approaches to implementing design tokens in a design system and the challenges each one surfaces.
A Strictly From Nowhere episode on founding and bootstrapping Design Systems House: how design systems build consistency and trust, their impact on SEO and accessibility, and the realities of building a business from the ground up.
A Supernova panel digging into their State of Design Tokens 2024 report with Jacob Miller and Kathleen McMahon: engineering's role in tokens, the rise of Figma variables, naming and standardization challenges, and code-based sources of truth.
A conversational UXDX Community session in New York questioning what a component actually is: whether a card with a button is one component or a composition of several, how patterns and styles shift the definition, and why shared units of measurement make success comparable across systems.
Episode 15 of the Code & Pixels podcast, where Donnie joins as founder and Chief Architect of Design Systems House to unpack what actually makes something a component.
Donnie's Clarity 2023 talk introducing Mise en Mode: organizing experiences through nested modes instead of ever-growing token sets, taking semantic responsibility away from tokens to avoid the 'OnDark' sprawl and keep systems expressive yet consistent.
A Clarity 2023 panel, moderated by Chris Strahl with Amy Lee and Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, on where design systems are heading: the convergence of design and engineering, composite tokens, decoupling structure from behavior, AI's emerging role, and systems as organizational infrastructure.
A CSS Club NYC meetup talk at Resobox in the East Village: what if we made HTML by writing CSS? A playful look at pushing CSS past styling into structure.
A DSW Day 2023 talk introducing 'token operations,' a proposed enhancement to the Design Tokens Community Group format that turns static token values into dynamic ones to serve the most complex systems.
A panel on theming in complex ecosystems with Skim Kimball and Mark Reynolds: how tools like Token Studio and Figma Variables are reshaping design and development workflows and the way design and engineering collaborate.
A Design Leader Insights interview where Alex talks with Donnie about the new Figma features shown at Config, where the design industry is heading, and his advice for design systems.
Episode 2 of the Design Systems Field Guide, a live Q&A session with special guest Donnie on building and maintaining design systems.
A lightning talk at the SmashingConf New York 2022 Jam Session on how designers use space, and how those habits might inform a new design token strategy for spacing.
A UX Untamed episode with host Julieth Fajardo on what a UX architect actually does: the responsibilities, skills, and career path, and when a team needs one.
A UXDX USA 2022 panel on scaling design systems for alignment across teams, with Alkistis Mavroeidi (KAYAK), Davy Fung (Disney Streaming), and Troy Azmoon (ServiceNow): how the designer's role is evolving and why alignment matters to product success.
A UXDX USA 2022 talk on moving past the layout grid: how grid-based design limits inclusivity, how to adopt a gridless methodology in an existing system, and why it points to the future of product design.
Design Systems Social Club episode on management, leadership, and organizational challenges in design systems teams.
Design Systems Social Club episode exploring new tools and emerging technology in the design systems space.
Design Systems Social Club episode on supporting 'exotic' platforms in a design system, like TVs, cars, and VR.
Design Systems Social Club episode on governance structures and decision-making frameworks in design systems.
An NYC Design Systems Coalition meetup talk, hosted by Reaktor, with a live demo of using html-sketchapp and Storybook to automatically generate Sketch symbols straight from coded components.