Brad Frost and Dan Mall: Rethinking designer-developer collaboration

Bios

Brad Frost is a web designer, speaker, writer, and consultant located in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of the book Atomic Design, which introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems. In addition to co-hosting the Style Guides Podcast, he has also helped create several tools and resources for web designers, including Pattern Lab, Styleguides.io, Style Guide Guide, This Is Responsive, Death to Bullshit, and more.

Dan Mall is the founder and director of SuperFriendly, a design collaborative that brings exquisite creative direction and design to the world’s most important and interesting organizations. He’s also the co-founder and CEO of SuperBooked, a networking service that helps you find work with a little help from your friends. You can learn more about Dan on his website and follow him @danmall.

Brad Frost and Dan Mall: Rethinking designer-developer collaboration

Dan Mall: The front part of the process where only designers are traditionally involved, well, let’s get developers in that part. And then the end part, where traditionally only developers are involved, well, let’s get designers in that part. Right? And that way, everyone has representation all throughout the process.

Narrator: This is The Design Better Podcast, where we share lessons and insights from today’s foremost design leaders. We hope the conversations and stories you hear help you transform your design practice and build remarkable products. In our third season, we’re exploring the connected workflow. How designers work more effectively and efficiently with their engineering and product counterparts. We’ll talk about how building key partnerships throughout an organization can help you ship better products faster. This podcast is hosted by Aarron Walter and Eli Woolery and is brought to you by InVision, the digital product design platform powering the world’s best experiences.

Aarron Walter: Design systems are a hot topic in the design world. But if you’re trying to implement one in your organization, you won’t get far unless your design and dev teams are aligned. In this episode, we chat with Brad Frost and Dan Mall about some of the best ways to get these teams to work together more effectively. Dan Mall is a design leader, the founder and director of the agency SuperFriendly, and the co-founder and CEO of SuperBooked. Brad Frost is also a design leader, as well as a web developer, and author of seminal design systems book, Atomic Design. Dan and Brad have worked on many projects together and share their thoughts on how agile affects the design-dev relationship, what the creative technologist role brings to the team, and how design systems can be a middle ground for designers and developers. They also give us a sneak peek of the masterclass they filmed on design systems for ambition. So, grab your developer partners and sit down for a great episode with Brad Frost and Dan Mall. Thanks for listening.

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