I like film photography! Feel free to drag these items around and make a surrealist collage.
Meta
In my time on the central design system team I’ve co-created an educational course for designers across the company and I currently work on defining, building, and evangelizing components and patterns for the system. Being on this team has forever changed the way I think about scale, and it's helped me ground my 0-1 work. Here’s→ one of my favourite talks on design systems!
Key concepts: taxonomy, building blocks, education, scale
The NPE Team→ stands for New Product Experimentation, which was Facebook’s playground for launching new apps focused on giving people entirely original experiences for building community. I stepped in to cover as the sole designer for a “hack-a-month” on an LGBTQ+ related product→ which ended up turning into a 5 month stint where I put together a full app vision as well as its proposed MVP.
Key concepts: 0-1, branding, community, privacy & security
Trying to help 3 billion people find their way around the Facebook app challenged a lot of assumptions I had about mental models and product education. I had a mild background and interest in architecture & urban planning, which has now turned into a deep interest in understanding how people conceptualize digital landscapes. Some of my learnings have informed the way I've laid out this portfolio!
Key concepts: information architecture, spatial models, the importance of labels
For more information, please
contact me 📋
Chromaskate is a passion project I started as a Pride fundraiser in June 2021, where we skateboard through paint and then sell off pieces of the canvas. Getting the paint to go on smoothly actually took a lot more engineering than you might think.
The colours for each piece are picked from images, flags, and art pieces that honour queer history and celebrate queer existence.
Since its inception we’ve created 15 large scale canvases! On one of the biggest, we wrote the codes of all 80+ anti-trans bills that had been passed that year and skated over them with colours inspired by indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau’s “Androgyny.”→
We’ve raised multiple thousands of dollars for a few different orgs, including For the Gworls→ who support Black trans folks with rent and gender-affirming surgeries, and BAAITS→ (Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits) to support their events and programming.
The ACLU Crisis Centre is the product of a 9 week senior design project with my teammates Chris Elawa and Sean Leach.
It was envisioned to be a hub on the ACLU’s website that provides resources for people who need urgent help in protecting their civil liberties.
The ACLU tackles big, precedent-setting cases related to the infringement of individuals’ civil liberties, and their website reflects this. The goal of the Crisis Centre was to make their existing content more accessible for folks in an emergency situation, such as knowing your rights in the event of an ICE raid or reporting a harmful interaction with the police.
The project won a Vancouver UX Award→ and it taught me that not everything you design needs to be an app!
I was born and raised on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, Canada), and I studied design at the School of Interactive Arts & Technology→ at Simon Fraser University.
I'd like to give a shoutout to our prof Russell Taylor→, who passed away recently (Aug 2024). He's the reason a lot of us turned out to be any good at design. He also took many of us through his annual field school program→ where we learned how to exist in a city and try to not be weird around famous designers and architects.
I seek to build and enable community in all that I create. I like to zoom between large systems and the tiny, individual stories within, often trying to illustrate connections between the big and the seemingly small. I'm most interested in amplifying oppressed voices and using both art and software design to subvert, to support, to create new nodes of connection.
When I'm not doing that, I'm often making videos, scheming my shared community/art space, finding flat rocks to skip on calm water, attempting surgery on my film camera, or playing piano.
Contact info
robyn.sfg@gmail.com