Chase McCoy

Chase McCoy is a senior design technologist based in Chicago leading the team behind Seeds, Sprout Social’s design system.

Hi there! 👋 and welcome to my website/portfolio/blog/wiki/library/digital garden/hyperlink abyss/etc. I’m a front-end engineer and designer who specializes in systems thinking, design tooling, and advocacy. This site is where I catalog my learnings as I go.

I’m currently leading the Design Systems team at Sprout Social, which designs and builds Seeds, our design system, as well as other tools used by Sprout employees to deliver consistently designed products to our customers. In the past I've worked as a mobile designer & iOS developer, creating indie apps in my spare time and building products for enterprise clients at my day job.

Photo of Chase McCoy standing and speaking to a group.

Focusing on —

Hypertext, CSS, semantic HTML, design systems, internet culture, online communities, indie publishing, creative coding, digital preservationism, and a diverse & open web.

Blog →
Recent thoughts
Measuring the health of a design system
Design systems are like community gardens, and understanding their health is key to success. Here's how the team at Sprout Social does it.
The gap problem
Exploring techniques and trade offs for creating reusable grid components using modern CSS best practices.
Generating friendly, unique identifiers
Using the friendly-words package from Glitch to create human readable identifiers.
CSS Resets
Taking a look at a few approaches to CSS resets across the web.
Minimum viable dark mode
How to create a quick and dirty dark mode for simple apps and websites using pure CSS.
Creating a useTextContent hook
How to create a custom React hook that can read the text content of a tree of nodes.
Building Sprout Social’s component library
How our team of three built a component library that designers and engineers love using.
Gatsby schema customization is pretty cool
Creating custom schemas for our data allows us to clean separate our view logic from our data source.
here are some things I've worked on
Three buttons representing three different categories of health—healthy, withering, and dormant.
2020

Measuring the health of a design system

Design systems are like community gardens, and understanding their health is key to success. Here's how the team at Sprout Social does it.

Read the case study →
A grid of random components, such as buttons and form elements, from Sprout Social's component library.
2018 — PRESENT

Seeds, Sprout Social’s design system and component library

The Design Systems team leads the development of the React component library driving all of Sprout’s products, as well as the website documenting our entire design system.

Redesigning the Sprout Social web app

In 2019, Sprout set out to redesign our entire user interface from the ground up for the first time in almost a decade. The legacy Sprout web application had become a mess of conflicting styles, patterns, and experiences. The product design led effort shipped to 100% of our customer base in January of 2020, and was very well received by our users.

A screenshot of the Sprout product before the redesign.
Sprout's legacy UI compared to the new UI. You can see how the “bones” of the app are largely the same.

We transitioned away from our classic green color palette to something a bit less jarring. We also switched from Proxima Nova to system fonts along with this refresh.

Click the images for the full-size version.
A screenshot of the Sprout application after the redesign.

The team directly responsible for the redesign was formed around our Design Systems team, and we heavily relied on our system and component library, Seeds, to tackle this project. This project gave our teams the opportunity to rebuild their existing UIs using our latest tools and best-practices.

This project was truly the ultimate test for our design system, and everyone (including our customers!) are very pleased with the results. Not only is the new interface easier to use and more consistent than ever, it's also more accessible, responsive, and scalable than ever before.

Logo for the Pico app.

Pico Digital Film

A fun little camera app for iOS designed by Louie Mantia and built using Swift by yours truly. Pico Cam allowed you to pick from one of a few carefully crafted films, and shoot photos pre-processed with that film.

Pico is no longer available for sale, and the domain for the website has expired. However, you can still check out the site on the Internet Archive. Louie also wrote about the history of the project when it launched back in 2017.

Screenshot of the Pico Cam app.