Andy Budd Founder of ClearLeft

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to Andy Budd, the founder of Clearleft, and we discuss bridging the gap between designers and technologists, the rise of design ops and its comparison to DevOps, and how great design can take your product to the next level. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Right? Because I've read your book.

(Andy Budd at 00:00:41) Wow. A long time ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) A while ago. So, I mean, that was one of the original CSS books that I ever came across.

(Andy Budd at 00:00:49) It was, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) Yeah. So when we were looking up for guests, I told Jenny, I was like, "Hey, Jenny, find people who are awesome and let me see a list of them." And I saw CSS Mastery, and I was like, that guy. I want that guy. Because, you know, I have a coding background. I've been writing code for seventeen years, so I'm loving it.

(Andy Budd at 00:01:09) Excellent. Well, I'm glad to be on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:11) So what's going on? What are you really excited about right now? What's going on in your life?

(Andy Budd at 00:01:14) So, I mean, you know, I've been running an agency for the last thirteen years called Clearleft, which takes up a ton of my time. We do a whole bunch of awesome things. I mean, obviously, we service clients, and we're working on projects for people like Virgin Holidays and Virgin Atlantic and British Gas and BBC and Open University and various cool names and companies in the UK. We've also done bits and pieces with Spotify over the last year and what have you. So that's really good fun. I also have a weird habit of starting conferences. So we've got a bunch of conferences we organize. We've got our conference that's been running for ten years called UX London. That's coming up in a couple of months' time. We've also got a new conference, which is only about three years old now, called Leading Design, which is coming up in October.

(Andy Budd at 00:02:05) So I guess at the moment, I'm partly excited to be attending our conference in a few months' time in London, but also I've started to think about who I might have for speakers at Leading Design. And as the name suggests, Leading Design is a conference around design leadership. So there are conferences for CTOs and heads of development. Somebody I know called Meri Williams runs a very excellent conference called The Lead Dev, and a lot of that is around how technology has professionalized over the last ten years. And I think, you know, design is now starting to catch up.

(Andy Budd at 00:02:42) I don't think we're quite as advanced in terms of the operationalizing of design, but we're getting there. So a lot of my friends that used to be designers are now leading small teams or leading big teams or maybe head of design or VP of design. And in some cases, you know, chief design officer or maybe even CEO. And so I'm really excited about how my agency and also myself as an individual can help promote the professionalization of the design community. So I guess those are a couple of really big themes and things that are occupying my time at the moment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:21) At what point were you sitting around, out of tea thinking, you know what? I need a conference.

(Andy Budd at 00:03:28) Well, I mean, like I say, I've got a bit of a habit here. So I went to South by Southwest first time in 2005, and it was such a transformatory moment for me. All of these people that I'd been following online—this was before Twitter, obviously—but all the people who I'd been following online on blogs, suddenly I met in person, had a great experience, got to share war stories, got to talk about the latest trends and techniques that are happening in the industry. And I came back to the UK in 2005 and thought, I want to go to another conference. Where are the conferences in the UK? And it turned out there were none. There literally were no web design conferences in the UK. So I thought I should start one. And, you know, it's kind of like throwing a party. You want to throw a party partly because you want to invite people around, but also you want to be able to play your own music and invite the people that you want to hang out with. And so I ran a conference in 2005 called dConstruct. That was the first design conference in the UK, and that got popular. We ran that for ten years from 2005 to 2015, and it was really good fun and met loads of really good friends doing it.

(Andy Budd at 00:04:40) And then I guess in 2009, we started UX London, and that's run for ten years now. I run Leading Design, and we run a bunch of other things. We run a conference on typography called Ampersand because we're kind of type nerds at Clearleft. We're really interested in design languages. So we ran a conference called Patterns down in Brighton, all about design languages.

(Andy Budd at 00:05:02) And I guess it's weird. As you mentioned, I started out as a developer. Actually, ages ago, I started out for my sins being a Flash developer, building Flash games.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:11) Oh, no.

(Andy Budd at 00:05:11) I know. It's terrible. We've all got these dark horses. I've been there. Very quickly, I learned the lesson of my ways, and I saw that Flash had a limited lifespan. And that's when I got into web standards, again, sort of early two thousands. I wrote my book, CSS Mastery, as you mentioned, in kind of 2004, 2005. And, again, weirdly, when I published CSS Mastery, it was the third CSS book that I was aware of out there. At the time, I was like, there's only two books. Who needs a third?

(Andy Budd at 00:05:41) So I really considered not publishing it because I thought the world didn't need three CSS books. Now, obviously, there are probably 300 or maybe even 3,000. So I'm glad I didn't listen to my inner critic and went ahead and published the book. The book's now in its third edition, and I've got no idea how many it sold. It's sold at least 250,000 copies.

(Andy Budd at 00:06:00) When the book first came out in 2005, it was outselling Harry Potter. Can you believe it? I mean, only for about a week. Yes. But it kind of did. So that was really good fun. And so yeah, I guess my whole career has basically been focused around trying to help people, whether it's companies, whether it's individual developers, whether it's teams to make the most of digital technology, whether that's by learning to code and learning CSS, whether it's by learning how to do UX better, because my company, Clearleft, was the first UX agency in the UK, or whether it's to professionalize design through design leadership. Everything I've done is basically been trying to increase the impact design can have on the world. So I really believe that design has the power to transform, has the power to make people's lives better, to take frustration away. And so I guess that's really what I've been doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:54) Well, it feels good.

(Andy Budd at 00:06:55) Yeah, it does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:56) It feels good. Good design makes you feel good inside.

(Andy Budd at 00:07:00) Absolutely. Not only that, but it kind of—like I say, people are really often really frustrated by technology. I'm sure we've all been in that situation where we've been trying to do something quickly, we've been rushing for a train, we try and buy a ticket, and we realize we've bought the wrong ticket or we bought an overpriced ticket. Technology can make us feel stupid and design has a big part to play in understanding the needs and frustrations of users and taking that pain away. Technology shouldn't make us feel stupid. It should make us feel empowered and design is part of that. I think the other challenge I find a lot of the time though, is when people talk about technology, they're often thinking about programming, they're often thinking about servers and backend tools and techniques, and that stuff is really important. But I think we are coming to a point where a lot of technology is increasingly becoming democratized. I think the rise of libraries and tool sets and programming environments and cloud computing, etcetera, is meaning that actually what used to be a really strong competitive advantage—it used to be that if you had the best technology, you would win out, your business would win out because it was a defensible position.

(Andy Budd at 00:08:17) But now you can copy someone's tech stack relatively cheaply, relatively quickly. And I think technology is becoming less and less of a differentiator. That's not so much the case when it comes to things like artificial intelligence, which is why I think your Facebooks and the Googles and the IBMs of the world are now starting to hire up all of the computer scientists out there because there is still that—that is an arena that's really tough to compete against. But just throwing up a website and building a simple app or a simple product, you know, there's very little that you can produce that your competitors can't basically copy in a couple of weeks or a couple of months. And so I generally think that design is one of the few things that is difficult to copy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:59) Well, it's like an art though because you can feel the person behind it that made it.

(Andy Budd at 00:09:07) I guess so. Yeah. I mean, I try and steer away from the kind of the art metaphor because I think too much of design focuses on the first order design, the look and feel, the graphic design area. And I actually think great design is much more around higher order problem solving. I mean, this is UX in a nutshell. UX isn't just focused on what something looks like, but actually how it goes about solving the needs of the user and the needs of the business. I think doing design well is around meeting those often unexpressed needs in a way that users never would have realized and never would have been able to articulate. And that is something that is quite difficult to—you can't just plug a bunch of tool sets together and suddenly get a great customer experience. So we all know that the brands that we love, the products that we buy is not just because they've been brilliantly engineered, but the whole experience has been thought out and considered and crafted.

(Andy Budd at 00:10:14) And you see this a lot. You know, you see all of these Apple wannabes. Every laptop now tries to look a little bit like an Apple computer, but it just isn't. There's something lacking. Every new entrant wants to try and take what Nest has done with a thermostat and apply it to other things—doorbells, smoke alarms, etcetera, etcetera. But again, they're kind of missing something that's really, really difficult to copy, which is solving those problems. And it's not just a case of copying features wholesale. It's about really understanding the users and the unique situation they find themselves in. And so like I say, I see design being an incredibly important part of most startups and tech companies' arsenal. And you see companies like Airbnb who were founded—two of the main co-founders of Airbnb were designers. And their solution wasn't a technical solution. Their solution was, you know, there were tons of couch surfing, home rental type services out there previously, but they really thought about the problem in a different, more connected way and produced a solution that was delightful on so many levels and really met the needs of the users, the homeowners, the travelers.

(Andy Budd at 00:11:25) And so, yeah, so I think design is increasingly important as technology becomes easier to copy. I think design becomes one of the few areas of competitive advantage that companies have got left.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:36) Yeah. I really like seeing them pop up because I was in the real estate space making technology and I love design, so I'm not a designer, but I can sure tell you what good design is and what bad design is. Right? So one of the big white spaces in the US was all the rental sites that did this were horrible, unusable, and ugly. So it can be unusable as one thing and it can be ugly as another. Right?

(Andy Budd at 00:12:04) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:05) When they came out and I saw them, I said, oh, finally. Because I grew up in this space, you know, writing code since right before, right when the Internet was coming out, when it was still dial up, and all the way through becoming a product maker, a maker of technology, and then watching the design happen. And so I was very excited over the course of this decade when I was like, oh, man, this niche got a well-designed product. They have a great team. Yes. There's a great team over there finally in this space. When is the great team gonna come out in that space? Right? Because designing great products—I meant art as an art form, like something that a skilled professional does. And so I consider it an art form, a very highly sought after skill to be able to create a quality product. And only because I put in the effort and energy to be creating products that were technically functional into products that made people's lives amazing. Right? So that transition of me learning, that did not come easy, so I have a high regard for any team that puts that together.

(Andy Budd at 00:13:12) I mean, absolutely. And often what happens is in industries or in sectors where nobody is excelling in particular areas, you've got this kind of level playing field. As soon as somebody decides to invest in design, suddenly they put their head above the parapet. They say we're gonna do something differently. Then all of the customers start flocking to this service, and then all the rest of the people in the industry have to then respond and say, "Okay. Well, we're now going to up our game when it comes to design." But, you know, because someone like Airbnb had invested in it from the start, you know, it might take eighteen months, two years, or longer for the rest of the companies to follow. And that gives Airbnb two, three years worth of fairly defensible time in which to build their market. And so, you know, I think you're in a great position. And if you find industries that have yet to really take customer experience seriously, and if you're one of the second tier competitors, or if you're a new startup that just wants to invest in that sector, go in, go in hard, go in strong, really value design, and you will be able to pull away so many of that sector's competitors for the clients.

(Andy Budd at 00:14:26) It's just, it's unbelievable. So, yeah, I think there's real power there. And it kind of completely makes sense. I mean, when you're new to a sector, all you need to do is provide a capability. Doesn't matter if it's good, doesn't matter if it's fun to use or even if it's easy to use. If you've never been able to book a homestay online and all of a sudden you can now book it, then people will go and use that tool irrespective of whether it's easy to use. But once everybody is offering that capability, then people will either go for the cheapest supplier or the supplier has the best stock or ideally the supplier that meets a set of emotional needs. And with Airbnb, they were run by designers. They targeted a bunch of digitally savvy people that cared about where they wanted to stay, but wanted to stay in beautiful surroundings. They invested in great photography, which is something that the real estate space did badly.

(Andy Budd at 00:15:19) And it was all wrapped in a kind of aspirational design that made people think that they were gonna go and stay in this beautiful apartment in New York. They get a slice of what New York felt like. And it felt really good and aspirational. So, yeah, I think design has an ability to really transform a whole range of sectors, whether it's B2C, B2B. But yeah. And I'm amazed how slow a lot of companies are on the uptake.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:46) Well, it's like the startup advice that people always give. You know, I'm starting to say, hey, find a—everyone was so focused on finding a great technology maker. I'm also saying find a great designer because the amount of design you need—I mean, if you have a co-founder that's a fantastic designer, then that's going to bleed into other parts of their business as well. Their ability to design things beautifully doesn't necessarily always stop at graphics. Right?

(Andy Budd at 00:16:11) Oh, god. No. I mean, I think a lot of the biggest challenges and the earliest challenges that startups face have a big design component, not necessarily what the interface looks like, but what are the kinds of needs we're trying to meet? What are the kinds of strategies that we're going to adopt to meet those needs? They're all using design thinking.

(Andy Budd at 00:16:33) The output might not be an interface. It might be a different business model or a different approach to solving the client's needs, but they're fundamentally design problems at the end of the day. They're often not technical problems. I think one of the challenges is you can't really start a startup, a tech startup, with a designer but no technologist. You can start with a technologist but no designer.

(Andy Budd at 00:16:57) You know, they'll build the thing. It might not be great to use, but the thing will exist. Like I say, the challenge is ten years ago, you could do that. Ten years ago, you could just build a thing that had never existed before. People didn't care what it looked like.

(Andy Budd at 00:17:10) Now we've spent the last eight years or however long it is living with really, really high quality apps, really, really high quality products. And so the expectations are significantly higher now. So I think gone are the days where you can just be a business major and a technology person. I think that founding team has to involve a designer. Now it might be that you bring in an external designer for the first eighteen months to solve the really big problems.

(Andy Budd at 00:17:37) And then once you solve the big problems, the delivery is mostly stylistic. And so I think this is one of the challenges. I think a lot of tech companies hire the cheapest designer they can at the start with the idea that once they've got a bunch of funding in six months' time or a year's time to hire a better designer, and actually design doesn't really work that way. If anything, you want to hire the best designer you can afford at the start and then maybe eighteen months in, you know, hire more junior designers to do the delivery and do the maintenance of that system that you've created. So, yes, the best way around doing that is just have a founder on your team that's a designer.

(Andy Budd at 00:18:13) Yeah. And the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:13) same thing is true with code. Right? A lot of people want to develop their prototypes, so they get a bunch of the cheapest developers they can get to build something, and they don't get a great person from the beginning, and then they essentially have to start over.

(Andy Budd at 00:18:25) Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, technical debt is a huge problem, and design debt is a real thing as well. You know, so many of the well-known products that we know today have been rebuilt and rebuilt two, three, four times from the ground up because so many hypotheses, so many bad coding decisions were made at the start, often necessarily, because there's no point optimizing for a billion users when you don't have ten users. So some of this is necessary, but I think while it's easier to refactor your codebase, it is a lot harder, I think, to refactor your design.

(Andy Budd at 00:19:01) And so, yeah, particularly in an aggressive sort of marketplace. So, yeah, hire the best designers you can. And I think that will set you off in the right course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:12) So there's some advice that I'd agree with, right, to give to the CTOs or the people doing startups. Hire the best designers you can at the beginning.

(Andy Budd at 00:19:20) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:21) So have any of your conferences made their way to the United States?

(Andy Budd at 00:19:26) Most of our conferences have been in the UK. We did run an edition of Ampersand, which is our typography conference, in New York, and we might consider running some of our other events in the US as well. But I mean, I think the US market is really well served with amazing events anyway. There's a ton of events that our friends at Adaptive Path do around design and design leadership in San Francisco. You know, I regularly speak at their events. Also Happy Cog with An Event Apart do some really, really great events for designers. So, you know, if we felt there was a unique angle or a unique thing that we could bring from the UK to the US, I don't think we would hesitate to do it. But I think just bringing it over for the sake of bringing it over, I don't think makes sense. So, who knows what the future will bring? But at the moment, we don't have any plans of running US events.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:22) Right. Because you want the necessity. Right?

(Andy Budd at 00:20:24) Yeah. And also, you know, we know our local market, and we're serving our local market really well. And I think it would be slightly hubristic to come over to the US and try and lecture you on how to do things and try and make a big splash there. So I think we're—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:41) No. We love you. I want you to come over here. I want to hang out, man.

(Andy Budd at 00:20:45) Okay. Well, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:48) I see your brand. I see what you've done. You're able to create these conferences. I go to conferences. I want an Andy Budd conference, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:56) Don't deprive me of that.

(Andy Budd at 00:20:58) Okay. Well, you might very well be able to convince me to come over. So I will have a think about that seriously. And, yeah, maybe next year we'll come over and we'll do a thing together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10) Yeah. Nothing's better than guest appearances. Right? Everybody loves a guest appearance.

(Andy Budd at 00:21:16) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16) and everybody knows your book too.

(Andy Budd at 00:21:18) Oh, well, look. I mean, I do come over and speak quite a lot. So if you or any of your listeners want me to come and speak at their event, I mean, I've just come back from a conference in Tokyo. A couple of weeks before I was at a conference in New Zealand. I was speaking at Adaptive Path's UX Week at the end of last year.

(Andy Budd at 00:21:34) I'm coming over to Chicago fairly soon. So I kind of get around. So, you know, there might be some opportunities to speak. I think one of the things that I'm really interested in with this podcast is obviously a lot of the people that I communicate with are the designers or the heads of marketing or heads of digital. And I think what we need to do is try and break down the silos between design and technology.

(Andy Budd at 00:21:57) Because at the end of the day, I think the best designers and the best technologists are all pulling for the same thing. So I would like to see more CTOs and technology leads speaking at design conferences, and I would love to see more designers speaking at technology conferences because I think there's so much we can learn from each other. I'm a big fan of cross-functional pairing. I like nothing more than putting designers and technologists together on a problem and watching them come at it from different perspectives.

(Andy Budd at 00:22:27) And I think our industry is getting a little bit too siloed at the moment. So, you know, if any of your technology listeners want a really, really passionate design speaker at their event, you know, drop me a line.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:39) Yeah. Well, that's why we're—that's literally why I'm having you on the podcast. So in my experience, diversity creates creativity, and diversity of experience creates all sorts of new positives. So I started in the real estate space making real estate products for, you know, a decade. And then through investors I met in products I knew, I got into the financial space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:04) And I walked into the financial space, and I'm like, oh, man. Everything's the same. It's just a different space. All the same issues. But there was a bunch of new stuff that I could see with new perspectives. So I could solve problems that I would see based on my experience in real estate even though they were different spaces.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:20) So then I took it even farther and started talking to different programmers of different languages, right, because I was really into writing code at the time. And as I started entering in these different areas of these deep wells of knowledge, you know, I just got so much benefit by talking to these other individuals. So, of course, when we're doing the podcast, we're talking to lots of CTOs, and I thought, what we've got to do is we've got to bring in some amazing people in design and marketing, branding, things like that, so that the CTOs can hear how they speak, hear the words that they say, kind of pick up on being around them, and that will bring benefit.

(Andy Budd at 00:23:56) And one of the things—so for instance, I think there's a lot that design can learn from technologists. I think there's a lot design leaders can learn from CTOs because I think in most organizations, technology has been a core function much longer than design has. You know, you typically find that in most organizations, if you have a very design-forward company, they might have one designer for every four developers. If you have a very old-fashioned technology company, it might be one designer for every ten developers. And so because of that, development has grown quickly.

(Andy Budd at 00:24:36) The development leaders, the CTOs and heads of technology, have got very, very good at managing teams, motivating teams, looking after their staff. And weirdly, only in the last two or three years, design has been catching up. So I think there's a lot we can learn from CTOs about how you work with the rest of the business, how you look after your teams, how you make impact, and how you drive your particular discipline forward. So I think there's a lot that we can learn. At the same time, I think there's a lot that technologists can benefit from design.

(Andy Budd at 00:25:12) I mean, I think one of the biggest talking points at the moment in the design space is the idea of design ops. And I don't know if design ops is something that is on your radar at the moment, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) Yeah, exactly.

(Andy Budd at 00:25:29) So, you know, ten years ago, DevOps was really big. How can we as technologists operationalize development? How can we scale it? How can we make it more efficient? How can we make sure that the tools and technologies are in place that we can deploy really quickly? And, also, how can we make sure that the management skills are in place that we can hire, recruit, and, you know, deliver work of a better quality faster?

(Andy Budd at 00:25:49) As I've seen a lot of my friends grow their design teams from five people to 20 people to 50 people to 200 people, we're now hitting the same challenges that development hit, you know, ten years ago. And so we've started using some of the language and some of the techniques of development and started applying it to design. So literally only in the last eighteen months, this kind of new field of design ops has emerged. It's not a direct one-to-one correlation with DevOps, but I think by using the language of design ops, when you talk to senior executives and you say, okay, well, design ops is a little bit like DevOps, then they kind of get where you're coming from. But ultimately you see a lot of companies like Airbnb—actually, they were one of the first people to really champion design ops.

(Andy Budd at 00:26:35) I think they were one of the first companies to actually have a design ops team. And what they've been doing is figuring out, how can we operate design at scale? How can we get this design into the hands of our users as quickly as possible? And so they'll be creating design systems and design languages. They'll be creating technological bridges between, say, Sketch and their code repo so that when you do something in a design UI kind of environment, rather than just saving the file and having to put it somewhere, it automatically gets submitted into your repo and maybe even goes live.

(Andy Budd at 00:27:14) So lots of tooling around how we can get the design assets to deployment faster. Also, a lot of design ops is focused around how can we operate more efficiently at scale. How can we put teams together? How can they work efficiently? How can we hire the right people? How can we get them working cross-disciplinary, cross-team? And so, yeah, we're slowly getting to a point where we're operationalizing design. And so I think there's a lot of things that design teams can do in concert with developers in order to get their work to the user faster. And I think that's fascinating. And so over the last eighteen months, I've seen designers and developers talking more and more around the same languages and around the same challenges than I ever have done in the past ten years of our careers, which I think is a wonderful space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:04) Yeah. I mean, look. You can leverage it for creativity, ask yourself strange questions, like, what's the Docker equivalent in design ops?

(Andy Budd at 00:28:13) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) What would sit there in that place on this, you know, supersymmetry concept? Right? Where would that be? There's your talk. There's—if it comes out good.

(Andy Budd at 00:28:25) Yeah, no, totally. I mean, again, there are so many different tools and different processes that developers have come up with and implemented to solve some of these problems. And so, yeah, we are thinking about what are the design equivalents? I mean, at the moment, I think a lot of it is focusing around design languages and how we can create sort of, you know, modular, kind of almost object-oriented design languages whereby we're not just designing things—and I mean, I think React is a great example of these encapsulated kind of UI elements that you can design in Sketch and then immediately update your React component library and then immediately flow into the live site without you having to go through fifteen different steps. And so, yeah, there's all these interesting tooling things that we're throwing together to make the process more efficient.

(Andy Budd at 00:29:19) And, yeah, there's—you know, we're really in the early days here, so there's a ton that we can learn from DevOps and development teams. But, yeah, it's—yeah. I mean, there are a range of tools that people like, you know, the Airbnb team have created that will allow you to bridge some of those gaps. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:47) That's amazing. That's where the future is, though.

(Andy Budd at 00:29:49) Really interesting. Oh, totally. Totally. We shouldn't be handing files to somebody else down a chain that then has to unpick it and pick it back together again and put it in some different system and translate it. We should have a tool set where the designer can make changes in Sketch ideally.

(Andy Budd at 00:30:06) And just by the act of pressing save, it flows through the process. I don't think we're there yet, but we're getting very, very close. InVision are working on projects like this, I'm sure Adobe are. Like I say, I know that a bunch of people at Airbnb have released a whole range of different interesting open source libraries and tools that bridge that gap. At Clearleft, we work on a little project called Fractal, which is a tool for maintaining code libraries so that everybody in the team can go to this single source of truth and grab all of the documentation and all of the code snippets and widgets, et cetera, to use in their tools so they're not having to reinvent the wheel.

(Andy Budd at 00:30:49) Because ultimately, this is what we saw. If you're just a design team of one or two, it doesn't matter whatever systems you use. But if you work in a company that's got 250 designers, which many of my friends work in, then suddenly you start seeing this drift in both design and code. You end up with 50 different button styles and 20 different form styles. And every time a developer or designer wants to do something, it's much easier to do it from new rather than trying to hunt down where the appropriate thing is.

(Andy Budd at 00:31:20) And so bringing all of this information together into a single source of truth that any designer, any developer can pull from is really important. It saves a ton of time. It saves a ton of money. And also it saves a ton of consistency. If you're a brand, you just want to have one button style, one style for headlines, one style for all of your components.

(Andy Budd at 00:31:43) And I think, you know, design systems and tool sets like React and Sketch all working together in harmony is the way forward. But it's still very early days yet, and there isn't a perfect solution. But, you know, these are all things that we're working on at different levels.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:58) Oh, I'm so excited to watch this play out. This is like the quality products entering new industries all over again. It's watching design emerge and deal with the same problems that scaling development had.

(Andy Budd at 00:32:08) Yeah. No. Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) I'm loving it. Oh, thank you for all your advice and input, man. We're gonna be out in London later this year. Are you around in the London area?

(Andy Budd at 00:32:20) I mean, I'm based in Brighton, which is an hour south of London. Brighton is a beautiful little city by the sea. It's where Londoners go at the weekend to relax and chill out. So I guess it would be the New York equivalent to the Hamptons maybe, or I don't know what the Bay Area equivalent would be. I guess it would be kind of Bodega Bay or I don't know, probably bigger. But yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:42) That's where I live, the number one beach in the world, that town. It's a small town, an hour south of Tampa, Florida.

(Andy Budd at 00:32:52) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) And yeah. So I live in that sort—I live, you know, twenty minutes from the craziness that's at the beach, so I live outside of it like a nice relaxed area. But if you want the beach, you just drive twenty minutes in and you're there.

(Andy Budd at 00:33:05) Sounds amazing. Well, sadly, our beach is all stones and pebbles. It's not a beautiful sand beach, but it's a really cool city. It's got a big creative industry. A lot of people that work in big companies in London will live in Brighton because it's a beautiful, relaxed lifestyle. But I'm up in London at least once a week. So yeah, when you pass through London, give me a shout. We'll go out. We'll grab some cool food. I'll show you some great coffee places and some great places to get cocktails and beers. And yeah, it'd be lovely to chat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:35) Isn't Brighton where Ed Sheeran's from? Musician.

(Andy Budd at 00:33:40) I think so. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:42) I hear him bring it up in his songs a lot. Really? I'm a fan. I listen to his music because I play guitar. Musician too, just as for fun. And he talks about Brighton in a couple of his songs.

(Andy Budd at 00:33:54) I mean, Brighton is a lovely place, and it's got a lot of cultural heritage. There's a really good music scene down here. Loads of good bands have sort of come from Brighton, you know, from back from the seventies in a mod scene through to kind of Fat Boy Slim is a local resident DJ, and often there'll be big parties on the beach he runs. Nick Cave lives down in Brighton. So it wouldn't surprise me if Ed Sheeran, if at least if he's not from Brighton, has spent some time here. He strikes me as someone that might come from Bristol rather than Brighton. I don't know, but I've got no idea where he's from, but there's a ton of really cool bands down in Brighton, a really lively music scene down here. So yeah, if we can get you down to Brighton, that'd be awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:34) Yeah. And do you know when you're going to be in Chicago?

(Andy Budd at 00:34:37) You know what? I should know that. Let me just pull up my calendar, and I will be able to tell you. August 6.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:44) August 6. Alright. Very cool.

(Andy Budd at 00:34:46) So yeah, I'm speaking at a conference called Prototypes Process and Play. It's kind of on the edge of design ops and how design and technology are working together. So that conference is on the ninth and the tenth of August, and I'm gonna head over to Chicago on the sixth. And you know what? I've never been to Chicago before. I've been all over North America. You know, I've been to a ton of obscure towns. I've never been to Chicago, so I'm so excited.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:15) You should be, man. It's always great. You've got some local connections there, right, that are gonna show you around?

(Andy Budd at 00:35:20) Oh yeah. Totally. So one of my friends is organizing the conference. He's kind of a local Chicago person. You know, I've been to New York a ton of times, and everyone says to me that Chicago is like a cool, you know, slightly more laid back version of New York. So yeah, I'm sure that's probably doing a disservice, but, you know, I've been told there's great architecture, great bars, really good food culture. So yeah, I can't believe it's taken me this long to get there, but I'm really, really excited to come to Chicago. But yeah, you know, I love spending time in the States. I find myself speaking there three or four times a year at various places. Been a long time since I've been down in Florida. I tend to end up speaking in New York or Austin or over on the West Coast. But yeah, you know, it should be fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:11) Yeah. Well, I put it on my calendar that you're gonna be at that conference in August because, you know, we travel a lot with the team, and we attend a lot of different conferences. So I always track everybody I talk to that I like. You know, they're real cool. I track them in my calendar. That way, whenever the opportunity comes up for us to cross, we're done.

(Andy Budd at 00:36:32) That'd be awesome, man. Yeah. Let's try and overlap and hang out in Chicago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:35) Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, man. And if people wanna find out more about you, how would they do that?

(Andy Budd at 00:36:41) Okay. I have a very underloved website, andybudd.com. It's my blog. It's been going for fifteen years. It hasn't been redesigned for about ten of those. So, you know, I don't necessarily always do what I say other people should do. But yeah, I occasionally post there or I post on Medium. The best way to follow me is on Twitter. I'm a very prolific Twitterer. So I'm just Andy Budd on Twitter. Or my agency is clearleft.com. Or, you know, UX London or Leading Design Conference would be the conferences I run. So yeah, there's a whole way of reaching out. So yeah, there you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:22) Wherever great designers congregate, Andy will be there.

(Andy Budd at 00:37:26) That is really true. I get around a lot. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:36) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.