Converge 2025: Living with Conway's Law in a Design System - Bill Collins

About the talk

This session explores the challenges and innovations of building a design system from the ground up, where engineering and design teams worked hand-in-hand to push beyond the limits of traditional design tools. Instead of letting tool constraints dictate the output, we expanded on established practices like design tokens to develop a system of dynamic compound tokens—allowing behaviours and appearances to be expressed far more efficiently.

The result is a translation layer that bridges design and development seamlessly. Components that once required tens of thousands of state definitions can now be described on just a handful of axes—dramatically improving consistency, reducing implementation overhead, and accelerating iteration.

About the speaker

Bill (he/him) is a common or garden developer, currently leading the web development efforts at HP's design system, Veneer. He drifted his way to design systems via synthetic biology, curriculum management, and automotive infotainment system SDKs. Clearly he lacks any vision for what he wants to do with his professional life. He enjoys complaining about how little sleep his six-year-old affords him and overengineering his model railway, but dislikes writing about himself in the third person.