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- Efficiency, respect, and the origins of design systems with Brad Frost on the On Theme podcast
Efficiency, respect, and the origins of design systems with Brad Frost on the On Theme podcast
it's here! season one launches NOW!

Friends, today’s the day — season one of the On Theme podcast is LIVE! 🎉
tl;dr: 🎧 listen to Episode #1 with Brad Frost on the origins of design systems right here, and don’t forget to text the show with your thoughts!
Keep reading for a personal note from me and a sneak peek into the episode.
I knew this going in, but wow, making your own podcast is a labor of love. Over the last few months I’ve recorded 20+ hours of content, realized my sound quality was garbage (sorry about these first few 😅, I hopefully have improved it!), and jumped in head-first to editing (my god, so tedious).
I had a goal to get the first ten episodes ready and queued up by now, as I’m about to be moving cities again, but January had other plans. Seeing a climate disaster unfold before your eyes is indescribable; I am so lucky and grateful that our house and things are okay, and so grateful for all of you who donated nearly $3k to provide warm meals for folks displaced by the fires and the heroic firefighters working in LA. 🙏🏻 Thank you!
But no more waiting—season one is here! I’m so excited to share these conversations with you all. Stay tuned for Jina Anne continuing our history lesson; deep-dives from Adriana Morales at HEB, ToniAnn Drenckhahn at BetMGM, Brian Alfaro at Yahoo, and so many more; spicy layoff chat with Noelle Lansford; and explorations into where systems teams should sit in the org with Davy Fung, and a vision of the future with Dan Mall. And yes, every episode has a 🌶️ Spicy Take.
I started On Theme because every conversation I have with a design system person these days is about all the challenges and problems we’re facing as a niche and as a tech industry. What’s interesting to me is that the problems we’re solving now, in 2025, are so different than the problems we were solving a decade ago — yet we’re still talking about design systems’ original promises: efficiency, component abstractions, shared code. But in some ways, those problems are solved; our hard-won early efforts were fruitful: components are normal now. We understand that a design system, whatever that means to you, is a valuable and necessary part of a modern tech org.
But what were those problems, and what’s different now? How did we get here? What were we doing a decade ago?
To kick off the season, I want to go back in time. So in Episode #01, we’ve got Brad Frost on the show to take us back to the early days of design systems. Brad has been “sweating the details,” as he puts it, of components and modular UI from the very beginning.
In this episode, he’ll walk us through some of the significant moments of evolution from style guides to modern design systems. We dig in to the multiple projects that helped us see components before there was Storybook, the original problem of sharing UI patterns, what React did (good and bad) for us, and Brad's personal moment of "oh, it's called design systems now."
🎧 Efficiency, respect, and the origins of design systems with Brad Frost — On Theme Episode #01 (43min)
Plus, catch Brad’s 🌶️ Spicy Take, and a vintage podcast throwback from the Style Guides Podcast feat. Dave Rupert.
Brad:
That's what we were doing with Pattern Lab. So we were contracted to deliver the front end templates for Techcrunch.com. There was another partner, the WordPress developers who were doing the backend work. So our handoff, our deliverable, to that agency was these production ready front end templates. And in order to do that, we need this more nimble environment, that allows us to work on the UI code in isolation. And [Pattern Lab] worked damn good.
But, but, but, here is the thing, we're handing this stuff off, and we're like, here's this whole tool and they're like, that's nice, and then trash can. It was just not what they needed. So there's, there's this disconnect. The spirit is here now, people are like getting those ideas, but there needs to be a delivery vehicle to connect [patterns with the codebase].
Elyse:
I love that you call it a delivery vehicle. I think that that really encapsulates what we were trying to do at the time. We were trying to say, how do we take these [patterns] and have them isolated from our actual applications so that we can think about them and build them and design them by themselves.
It hadn't quite settled into the industry at large yet. And what was happening at that time was, you were building Pattern Lab, all across the industry, everybody was hand rolling this, everybody was making their own little proto storybooks because these ideas were starting to circulate.
I think, especially on the design side, we were starting to go, hmm, like, we're going to make what we'll call it a sticker sheet, right? [But] we weren't really able to do much with that on the engineering side. The key, is that at this time, those patterns or components, like we might start building them in this standalone place with this like proto Storybook, but then they would just get put into the app.
Brad:
You include a CSS file, copy and paste the HTML snippets and hack it apart. But that's obviously not DRY, you got a bunch of loose markup kind of floating around.
Elyse:
Yeah, it took a couple years after that, for, we'll say React, there were other things like Angular, Ember, other frameworks that were thinking about this componentization pattern, but it took a couple of years to move into the industry at large. And I would say that was probably 2016 when companies started to be like, oh, we're going to rebuild this thing in React. And for obvious reasons, the idea of components took off at the same time, because we had these concepts that you have suddenly the ability to actually implement that.
Brad:
I'll add one more thing to the equation: ES modules, the actual technology, that is baked into JavaScript. That's around 2016, the actual technology to be able to deliver modules like this. So with JavaScript and ES modules we are able to import this [component code] that's coming from somewhere else into my JavaScript file [in the app]. And then do something with it, right? So you're able to actually stitch all this stuff together in meaningful ways.
What React did was like, yeah, everything here is a component. And that concept, coupled with atomic design, those things were fellow travelers, and then the technology kind of became available to actually start doing it, to actually start connecting these dots, right? That, uh, in the talks I give, on this history, it's like before, it's just like a bunch of dotted lines, conceptual relationships, and then with, React and ES modules you're actually getting these solid lines of like, oh, this is like an actual dependency, this is an actual relationship versus like a theoretical one.

🎨🎟️ Into Design Systems is May 25-28. Get your ticket at intodesignsystems.com/ontheme
Into Design Systems is back with their annual virtual conference, May 28-30, 2025. Get your ticket now for three days of practical, hands on sessions showing the what, why, and how of design systems. This year, the conference is focused on developer handoff, accessibility, multi brand theming, and governance. You'll get hands on knowledge you can put to use at work immediately, files and resources to take away, and hear from very well known industry speakers. Get your ticket and support the podcast by supporting our generous sponsor!
💖 On Theme is a brand new podcast, so if you like what you're hearing, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and share the show with someone! I love hearing your thoughts and questions, so to text the show or message me on LinkedIn and let me know what you think!
See you next episode!,
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