At Facebook I led the Design Infrastructure team. We built internal design tools and infrastructure that 8 hours per week per designer.
A few examples of the work we were doing:
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Plugins (hacked together with AppleScript and JavaScript) to push Facebook Design System updates to every designer in Sketch and Origami Studio.
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Built an internal collaboration tool called Pixelcloud that allowed designers to share, discuss, review, and hand off work to engineering.
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Extended Sketch and Origami Studio with Auto Layout (before Figma!) using the same open source layout engine that engineering teams used in code.
As a design manager my role was supporting the team of 7 designers, working with engineering and other cross functional partners, working with other product teams to understand what they needed from our team, and defining the roadmap and strategy for the team.
Sketch plugins
One of the highest leverage areas for the team was adding functionality to Sketch that improved design workflows.
Our team built tools around the idea that designers needed real components, real data, and real layout—the same primitives engineers have when building out UI.
UI Kit
UI Kit was a tool built for Sketch that distributed Facebook's component library to every designer across the company, allowing the Design Systems team to push updates out to designers weekly as components changed.
LayoutKit
LayoutKit was built to add real layout controls to Sketch enabling designers to built complex layouts and use the same rules and terminology that engineers would use when building UI for web, iOS, and Android platforms.
LayoutKit was built with Yoga, Facebook's open source layout engine.
Pixelcloud
Pixelcloud is Facebook's internal design collaboration tool. It integrated closely with Sketch, allowing designers to push their designs to the web directly for Sketch for sharing and to get feedback from across the company.
Origami Studio
Our team was responsible for Origami Studio, used at Facebook and by companies like Apple to prototype iOS and MacOS applications.
Origami is based on Quartz Composer and was built at Facebook. The major change during my time was moving from pure patch-based workflows to adding the tools and UI that designers are used to in software like Sketch, Figma, and Adobe's suite of tools.