San Francisco, California
September 2008—Present
Web Design New Media.
I was taking classes part-time toward a masters to pursue teaching at a later point in my career. All my classes are completed, but I still have a final thesis to complete. I will be resuming the program in the near future.
Florence, Italy
June 2006
Book Arts, Italian Language
Memphis, Tennessee
August 2001–July 2006
I studied both Computer Arts/New Media and Graphic Design majors.
November 28, 2017
Authors: Marco Suarez, Jina Anne, Katie Sylor-Miller, Diana Mounter, & Roy Stanfield. Published by DesignBetter.co by InVision.
November 13, 2014
Authors: Dan Cederholm. Published by A Book Apart.
April 7, 2009
Author: Elliot Jay Stocks. Published by SitePoint.
October 20, 2009
Authors: Jina Anne, Derek Featherstone, & Tim Connell. Published by SitePoint.
March 19, 2007
Authors: Jonathan Snook, Steve Smith, Jina Anne, Cameron Adams, & David Johnson. Published by SitePoint.
June 2019–Present
Area of focus: User Experience and frontend development.
February 2019–July 2019
Area of focus: Visual Design. This category in the program was discontinued in July 2019.
July 2019–Present
Focused on community and education
February 2019–Present
Focused on content and social media
August 2005–Present
November 2014–Present
Leading the brand and website design, development, and content.
San Francisco, California
January 2000–Present
As an independent consult, I design, advise/coach/mentor, and provide workshops for companies which have included Blend, IBM, Amazon, Cardstack, Deloitte, Justworks, Mass.gov, Upwork, W3C, Webflow, etc.
Recent projects are executed as collaborations with distributed and virtual studios and agencies including Superfriendly, Nine Labs, Group of Humans, and Josh Silverman.
I run events including Clarity (a design systems conference), the Design Systems Coalition SF (an SF-area meet up dedicated to all things design systems), and The Mixin (an SF Sass & Frontend meet up).
I also run other community projects including the Design Systems Slack (with 16K+ members), Sass.News, Design Systems Jobs, etc.
San Francisco, California
August 2017–September 2018
I led the design systems and design operations for a new product. The responsibilities included documentation, providing creative, interaction, and visual design direction to the design team, frontend development, accessibility, design tooling distribution, etc.
San Francisco, California
January 2016–August 2017
Taking on a larger role as Lead Designer, I led the information architecture, design, and development for the design system. I also partnered with other designers to adopt the system. I continued evangelism efforts internally and externally.
November 2015–December 2015
I pitched the design system to stakeholders in engineering and design leadership, and got buy-in. With the Lightning Design System funded and a team formalized, I received a title change to clarify my role. I conducted design systems work (which included UX design, visual design, frontend development, and documentation). I drafted the team vision and charter and worked closely with our team’s people manager on planning and presenting our goals with the organization.
I also led the UX organization’s evangelism and outreach efforts including being the Editor-in-chief for the team blog, the admin for the social media accounts, organizer of various meet ups and conference sponsorships, writing, speaking, and coaching both internal and external people on best practices using the design system.
I also mentored designers to level up their skills in frontend development.
December 2014–November 2015
I moved to the core team to work on design systems across the various products. I worked closely with other product designers to standardize and document the design language and specifications for mobile and web application designs.
I helped invent design tokens, which became adopted by the industry as a best practice for scaling design in a system.
February 2012–December 2014
On a small design team of 3, I worked on a product called Do which was a social productivity product. Because we were a small team, I was product designer, marketing designer, and web developer. I led the Android app design. I also created the style guide for the marketing website and web application, as well as guided the engineering team on CSS best practices. Additionally, I led some of the design features for the iPhone application.
Prior to hiring a marketing designer, I took on those projects which included our assets for the app/play stores, social media channels, and microsites for our marketing videos.
This product, owned by Salesforce, was sunset in 2014. The domain name was sold, so the Do that exists today is not the same product.
San Francisco, California
September 2011–December 2011
I designed screens for pricing and sign up flows and the mobile app. I also did graphic design work which even included Dodgeball uniforms and a company party invitation.
San Francisco, California
September 2010–September 2011
I led the user experience design, visual design, and frontend Sass develpment in-house for the AppCloud experience. I developed a coded, living style during the early days of this practice.
New York City, New York (remote from San Francisco, California)
February 2009–September 2010
I provided design and frontend web development for various company products as well as client projects, which includEd the ABC Nightline iPad and Twitter-stream microsite, the Disney iPhone app, 50 People One Question, and more.
Cupertino, California
March 2008–March 2009
I produced visual and interaction design in-house for various features for the online shopping experience. This included the Mac configurator, the Cart and Checkout experience, the Sign In/Create Account flows, the iPhone purchase with mobile carrier sign up flows, education landing pages, and more.
I also designed and documented a style guide for the team.
March 2007–March 2008
I led the CSS architecture in-house for the remodel project, moving to entire online experience to web standards. I also maintained and documented front-end best practices into a style guide.
Memphis, Tennessee
July 2006–February 2007
I was an Interactive web designer and frontend web developer for clients including NuVasive, Medtronic, FedEx, Posh Pattern, and more.
Lowercase is intentional — the company prefers it for its name.
Memphis, Tennessee
August 2005–June 2006
I was a part-time web developer and designer for websites, business cards, and other printed materials for clients including Emerge Memphis, Germantown Day Spa, etc.
Memphis, Tennessee
April 2005–August 2005
In-house, I was a web developer and graphic designer for brochures, branded merchandise and gifts, company newsletter, stationery, large-scale graphics for trade show booths, company vehicles, and the intranet website.
Memphis, Tennessee
April 2004–July 2004
Memphis, Tennessee
January 2004–April 2004
As an intern, I provided design and frontend development for client projects for a leading Memphis agency. This included creating style guides documenting design and code.
Clients included American Contract Bridge League, FedEx, International Paper, Anita Kerr, etc.
San Francisco, California
September 2019–Present
I am an Advisor for the company’s various products, including the open-source project Diez (diez.org), a cross-platform design system framework. Diez makes it easy to adopt a unified design language across codebases, platforms, and teams.
San Francisco, California
January 2019–Present
I advise a new start up, by meeting with the CEO and board of directors, and other contributors to provide guidance and feedback on their design direction and user experience.