February 2025
Figma fun
Charlotte, Nikin and I started the month trying to work out if we need to impose any order on the various ways teams are documenting design patterns in GDS. This then veered into resuming an oft-dropped piece of work looking at how Figma could work better across government.
At the moment, each department has its own separate Figma plan, and Figma’s current setup makes it difficult to share work between organisations. All of government seems to be working on duplicates of Joe’s template, which get out of date and misaligned whenever we update anything in the GOV.UK Design System.
We’re linking up with colleagues in departments, who naturally all share the same problem. The people at Figma have so far been pretty open to helping with this, so hopefully it bears some fruit.
Supporting the design community
The design leadership group at GDS is currently working through how best to support the design community, with the challenging constraint of this not being anyone’s main job. We’re going to need to prioritise our efforts carefully, and probably delegate more things to more of the designers. And somehow, amongst all that, make the case for more support for communities.
To be honest the current barrier to this work progressing is the fact that when you put everyone’s calendars together it looks like your screen has broken. I used to scoff at how many ‘away days’ senior leaders go on, tbh now I get it. Maybe it’s time to book in another one.
Working is weird atm
Working whilst waiting for a child to be born is weird as hell. I’ll get into something for an hour and completely forget it’s happening. Then go make a cup of tea and remember that it very much is happening.
Forms
When I return from paternity leave (whenever that is), I’m going to be joining the GOV.UK Forms team. The product’s currently in beta, has over 100 live forms on GOV.UK, and has lots more growing to do so it should be fun. I’m really looking forward to being on a team again, and to working more closely with Agz and Chris (and everyone else obvs).
Reading
I’ve been reading loads so far this year. The combination of a sparse social calendar and grindingly slow trains to Manchester have really sorted me out there.
I polished off Gary Stevenson’s ‘The Trading Game’ in 4 or 5 days. Cracking read. It’s more of a memoir than the sort of economics lessons he does on YouTube. Really funny and fast-paced, and paints an enjoyably unflattering portrait of some of the people he worked with in the City.
On a very different note, ‘Soldier Sailor’ by Claire Kilroy was a beautiful / terrifying meditation on the emotional toil of early parenthood. I’m not sure it was the smartest choice of book for calming any anxieties I personally might have, but it was very good.
Describing something as a ‘meditation on’ sounds really cultured doesn’t it. I’ll be honest, I have no idea what it means.
Another year older
It was my birthday earlier in the month (thank you). It happily fell on a Sunday and took in many of my favourite things: a visit to the aquarium in town, a wine-addled lunch at fancy local spot Belzan, and my approximately 1000th viewing of Michael Mann’s finest, Heat.