Knapsack

Brad Frost makes things and helps people. He’s a web designer & developer, speaker, writer, teacher, consultant, musician, artist, and enthusiasm enthusiast located in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of Atomic Design, which introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems. He helps digital designers and developers level up through online courses about design systems, design tokens, frontend development, collaboration, and more. He hosts the @Wake Up Excited! podcast where he talks to exuberant people about living a creative and fulfilling life. Join Brad Frost at the Knapsack Patterns Summit this Thursday in Pittsburgh, we have 3 spots left! #Patterns #designsystems

Louis Manning is a design leader at ADP focused on building scalable design systems and meaningful user experiences. He leads a dedicated team that enhances enterprise products and explores AI-driven solutions for designers and design system practitioners. Lou will be sharing his story and an AI ready sandbox he has been working on at the Knapsack Patterns summit this week in Pittsburgh, this is a room you want to be in if you are part of the #designsystem community!

Anna C Shade will share her story of a career that blends a lifelong interest in art and human experience with deep systems thinking shaped by early personal and career experiences. Her path in financial services - through operations, technology, and product - exposed her to early digital delivery and design collaboration, ultimately leading her to build, support and advocate for design-led ways of working. She now leads Design Operations for Retail Digital & Payments as well as leading two design systems teams, focused on delivering consistent digital experiences in a long-established organization.  _____________________________________________________________ We have 3 spots left for the Knapsack Patterns summit this week in Pittsburgh, this is a room you want to be in if you are part of the #designsystem community!

Design systems teams carry one of the most invisible loads in tech — they serve every team, ship for every product, and belong to no one on the org chart. Next Thursday in Pittsburgh, we're naming that out loud at the Knapsack Patterns Summit. Knapsack will be hosting the Patterns Summit Pittsburgh that will include a panel with Anna C Shade from PNC, Brad Frost, and Louis Manning from ADP — talking about what this work actually costs, and what makes it worth it. The conversation covers governance that holds up on a real Tuesday morning, the pressure that rarely makes it into retrospectives, and what people in this field do outside of work that makes them better at it. If you're a design systems practitioner, lead, or executive - this is the room to be in. #Patterns

"Magic, by definition, cannot be trusted with anything important." At our Patterns Leadership Summit in Houston, Knapsack VP of Product Robin Cannon flipped a famous observation: the moment something matters, we demand to see the mechanism. That's exactly where we are with AI. Our attendees all described the same pattern: accurate AI outputs that teams refused to use — not because they were wrong, but because no one could explain where they came from. 53% of consumers don't trust AI search results. This isn't a model problem. It's an infrastructure problem. AI needs a source of truth to anchor to. A unified, opinionated design system gives it one — so outputs reflect real standards, not guesswork. The teams getting AI right aren't the ones with the most sophisticated models. They're the ones who built the foundation first. 🔗 Read the full article here: https://hubs.ly/Q0494F8V0

Houston, we 💜 you! Thank you for coming out to Patterns Summit, we loved seeing lots of you again and meeting all the new faces. We are especially thankful to our AMAZING panel of speakers and our featured speakers: - Amber Koelzer: https://hubs.ly/Q047Ynxm0 - Stefany Alarcon: https://hubs.ly/Q047YcZj0 - Larry Pelty: https://hubs.ly/Q047Ykbf0 - Robin Cannon: https://hubs.ly/Q047Yf850 We have more events coming up in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Denver, and a handful of cities on waitlist for dates! (We’ll be announcing those soon 👀). Join us at Patterns and meet your people: https://hubs.ly/Q047Yh-C0

“Design systems emerged to solve very real issues… but the environment those systems operate in is changing, and our definitions aren’t keeping up.” Knapsack VP of Product, Robin Cannon, discusses in a recent article why the design system as we know it has outgrown its name — and its scope. As AI reshapes how products are built, the most valuable work is no longer maintaining a component library. It's making implicit product context explicit and machine-readable: the decisions, constraints, exceptions, and reasoning that live outside any single file or doc. Read the full article here: https://hubs.ly/Q047lKv20 #DesignSystems #AI #DigitalProduction #Product #Context

Live Knapsack demo. Every Thursday. Curious how we can help product, design, and engineering enterprise teams work in one collaborative workspace? Sign up for a live demo to learn how your organization can build better products in half the time and create infrastructure for AI workflows. Save your seat → https://hubs.ly/Q047k8pJ0 #Knapsack #DesignSystems #DigitalProduction #LiveDemo #Enterprise

Chris Strahl sits down with Maurie Beasley, M.Ed and Jim Beasley of AIEdPro to talk about how AI is changing the way software products are designed, built, and shipped. In this episode, they discuss how modern companies are using AI to shorten the path from an idea to a working product. The conversation also tackles some big questions about the future of technology careers: if AI can help write code, what should computer science students be learning today? How important are experience, systems thinking, and good problem framing in an AI-assisted world? 🎧 Listen here: https://hubs.ly/Q046N89_0 #Knapsack #AI #DigitalProduction #DesignSystems

Digital products no longer exist as standalone apps. They live inside complex ecosystems of interfaces, AI systems, legacy infrastructure, and workflows that all have to work together. In this episode of Patterns Podcast, Chris Strahl talks with product design leader Andi Rusu about what it takes to design reliable digital experiences in environments where multiple systems—and increasingly AI—are shaping how products behave. 🎧 Listen now: https://hubs.ly/Q046nfKN0 #Knapsack #PatternsPodcast #AI #DigitalProduction #DesignSystems