50 shades of black
An exploration of black color palettes
Diana Mounter
designs for humans
I'm a product designer based in Brooklyn, NY. I lead design systems at GitHub, and I organize the NYC Design Systems Coalition—a community for people who build design systems to share and learn from each other.
Check out my (somewhat out-of-date) Portfolio for past work.
Hear me talk about my journey to Etsy, the startup bus, why Git is a valuable tool for designers, and onboarding designers at Etsy.
An exploration of black color palettes
Jekyll theme
A musical blog
An army of illustrated robots
For many designers the best way to learn front-end development is on the job. Many companies want to attract designers who code, but may fall short of providing enough support.
How we redesigned the seller-facing web app, and built a new style guide in the process. Written for Etsy's Code as Craft blog, in collaboration with coworkers from the shop management team.
The biggest challenges you face in a workplace are often not in how to build the product, but in how to build a healthy work environment.
I spent the majority of my first trip to America looking at a computer screen, while sat on a bus that traveled from San Francisco to Austin. It turned out to be a life-changing experience.
Design Driven, March 2017
A short talk on the work behind updating GitHub's color palette, introducing a new system to organize thousands of hex values, and implementing a more inclusive and accessible color scheme.
Wildhacks, November 2016
This talk is about building confidence, how compassion and competence play a role, dealing with imposter syndrome, and the challenges of being a designer and a women in tech.
Awwwards NYC, June 2016
Learning to code is a journey, and the first milestone for designers is often learning HTML and CSS. A great style guide can really propel a designer on their journey to becoming a key contributor. The same attributes that make a style guides great for designing in the browser also help with CSS maintainability, scalability, performance, and can even make it enjoyable to work with CSS again. This talk delves into what makes a great style guide for designers and everyone else, with some tips on the process of building style guides.
Clarity conference after party, March 2016
I've learned a lot about the hard and soft skills you need to build style guides from my experiences at Etsy and GitHub. This doesn't cover all the things I know, but this quick and fun lightning talk covers some of the most useful and practical things I've learned over the years.
Design Driven NYC, November 2014
In early 2014 the Seller Services team at Etsy began work on building better shop management tools for sellers; one of the goals being to improve the mobile web experience. The existing Etsy style guide did not lend itself well to responsive layouts, styles had become outdated, documentation was missing, and designers and developers often had to write a lot of CSS for experiments and new features.
As part of the shop tools project, myself and 3 fellow designers embarked on building a new "living" style guide. This talk covers some of the lessons we learned along the way.
Metis, November 2014
Designing for people is at the heart of my design process, as is collaboration with my coworkers. At Etsy designers are informed by user research and analytics, and work closely with engineers and product managers to build the right experience for our audience.
This talk covers how people-centric design and team collaboration are at the core of how we design and build Etsy.