Chase McCoy is a product designer ✐, front-end engineer ⌨︎, and internet explorer working on design systems ❏ at
Growing up online is where I developed a love for visual and interface design, and I earned a degree in Computer Science so I could make those designs real. I got my start doing iOS design and development, but I spend most of my time these days thinking about the web—how it works, how it’s changing, and how we can make it a better place.
This website is my home on the web, and in the words of Laurel Schwulst it is truly “a shifting house next to a river of knowledge.” I use this site to share my thoughts, keep a record of my work, and catalog the things I discover online.
Featured writing
Design systems as knowledge graphs×Songs of summer×A space for ourselves×Measuring the health of a design system
Now
I’m currently focused on design systems.
Community
Scaling systems requires a community effort. Collaborating with stakeholders and earning trust is a huge part of the work.
Communication
Design systems are often about managing change over time, and the best way to do that is clear and frequent communication.
Tooling
Empowering creatives with well-crafted component libraries and bespoke design tooling.
Patterns
System practitioners are masters of abstraction, and serve as the stewards, scribes, and librarians of a product experience.
Read my notes on design systems
The notes section of this site contains useful links, quotes, and insights related to design systems and the work that goes into them.
Museo.app
A visual search engine for free-to-use images from some of the best museums in the world.
Museo is an open source web interface that connects you with the the following institutions:
- The Art Institute of Chicago
- The Rijksmuseum
- The Harvard Art Museums
- The New York Public Library Digital Collection
This tool is possible because these institutions provide open and free API access to their collections. All of the images you find with Museo are completely free-to-use, so download away.
Previously
SeedsSprout Social’s design system and component library.
As lead of the Design Systems team at Sprout I helped ship a complete redesign of our product, developed a themeable component library, and fostered a healthy community to support our system.
The Seeds design system covers a large breath of content for stakeholders across product and brand design, writing, engineering, and more. Under my leadership, a small team of 3 people grew this system from the ground up to support a massive product organization. I used both my technical and design skills to help us achieve a system powered by a strong community of users and contributors.
A successful design system practice combines two things: products and programs
Products take the form of documentation websites, design tokens, component libraries, and custom design or developer tools. The problems in this space are often technical and lay the foundation for a healthy system.
While products help to make our user’s work more correct and efficient, programs make work more collaborative and inclusive. These are the services and activities that the system team provides to their users. I like to focus on three in particular:
Consultation
Partnership
Documentation
Providing services like these for our users builds trust and investment in the system, and helps them integrate systems thinking back into their own work. Being service-oriented also provides lots of great opportunities for on-the-spot user research that, in turn, can be used to improve our core products and programs.
Visit Seeds to learn more
Pico Digital Film was 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.
