How to make a design system that’s not boring

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JASON LENGSTORF: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Learn With Jason today, we are going to be digging into something� if you've been working on a team of any sufficient size, you've probably encountered. So we're going to dig into design systems and design tokens with somebody who is an expert, one of the biggest names in the design token space, um, Brad Frost. So, today's episode is going to be very, kind of foundational. I've got a lot of questions about how we make things work. You know, how do you draw the line between too much design system and not enough. How do you decide what's a design token and what's not? To help you make better decisions about how do build, think about and interact with, even if you're not the builder of a design system, being able to work with them effectively and have good communication.
Let's jump on into that by� we're starting out with something a little bit new this time, so, buckle up. Hiring is hard right now. It's extremely noisy. G2I will help you place engineers so much faster, that's how were able to place them. They are superfast because of how well they were screened. You should find out more about them. What's up, everybody? Welcome, Brad, how you doing?

BRAD FROST: Hey, fantastic. Thanks so much for having me.

JASON LENGSTORF: I'm superexcited. We realized, before we went live, we've known each other forever but we've never spoken. This is the first time we've had a voicetovoice communication.

BRAD FROST: A few email threads, back and forth, over the years. It's so great to connect, even though it's not inperson. Next time, we'll hug and highfive.

JASON LENGSTORF: Exactly. Let's just start by doing some very� some very high level. In one or two sentences, can you tell me what the heck the difference is between design tokens and design systems?

BRAD FROST: Yeah. So, design tokens are a part of design systems. So, design systems is this big umbrella under which I describe a design system as a story of how your organization designs and builds digital interfaces and there's a lot of ingredients that can go into telling that story. A component library, which we'll all familiar with, here's your buttons, alerts, form controls, are one important facet of that. And, but then design tokens are this other subsystem within a design system that handles a lot of the aesthetic decisions, such as, you know, your colors and your typography and your border radius values.
I kind of described the relationship between a component system and the aesthetic decisions, the token system, as kind of similar to a door. Where it's like if you're in the market for a door and you go to Home Depo or Lowe's. You might see a hollow door for contractors to pass ADA requirements and be compatible with requirements and codes and all that good stuff. And, you know, it might be a solid core door, like a solid oak door that isn't primed or anything like that so it's like, you're not going to see turquoise or pink or orange doors in that aisle. What you're going to see is, here's some door frames. The hinges are on the right or the left, there's a hole for the hardware, for the doorknob. In order to deal with, well, what color is this door is going to be or what hardware finish? Those are different concerns. Right. That's a separation of concerns that you're going to find in these different aisles so what we found over the years, working with so many different organizations, design system sends to be talked about as a singular thing but what we found is that kind of operationally, kind of having a component system that really delivers the semantics and the structure and the functionality of these UI components is really, really helpful and then having this sort of separate thing that is handling more the cosmetic, right. The pink colors and the� and the, you know, hardware finish and having those things hang together, they have a relationship. The tokens through the component in order to render the results.

JASON LENGSTORF: I kind of papered over own experience, maybe that's a good place to go next is, let's talk a little bit about who you are and sort of what your journey was into becoming the person with the complete guide to design systems.

BRAD FROST: Yeah, so, GeoCities, 1997, Dragon Ball Z and into� started as a music major and switched into Media Arts and Design and�

JASON LENGSTORF: Did we have the same childhood?
[Laughter].

BRAD FROST: Yeah. So, probably. [Laughter]. Yeah, so basically, yeah. Designing with web standards. Shortly after graduating and, you know, got into making websites and basically have been doing that ever since, really. And basically, so I've worked� kind of came up through working at different agencies, and stuff like that, so getting� trying my hand at a bunch of stuff, WordPress sites, we did a lot of Ecommerce. Working with all sorts of different clients and in 2013, I set out on my own, as a freelancer and over time, I basically started doing more and more consulting to help with teams because at that 2013 moment is where I had been sort of wrestling with a lot of the things that came along for the ride with responsive web design, right. So, Ethan, 20102011. I was working� got a job as a mobile web developer at RGA in New York City. A mobile web developer. I'm like, what's that?
[Laughter]. This was at the time where the iPhone had just come out. The web world wasn't quite focused there. It wasn't quite there. So, it was this great opportunity. It was very much right time, right place, in figuring out, by way of building sites the Nike and Tiffany & Co, how do we deliver to these devices, not screen sizes. I was working with Blackberries. It was wild. It was really cool.
And so, we were kind of doing this thing that became known as responsive web design and� but it was through that experience that I'm like, well it's not that it's the home page is hard to make responsive. No, no, no. It's the nav. We've got this horizontal nav on the header and we need to do something different on the sort of small screens so that's kind of what got me into this world of components and patterns.

JASON LENGSTORF: It's interesting. As you described, you worked on lots of different sites. The appreciation for design systems seems to come in when you've realized how everything is basically the same, but it's all very nuanced and, you know, the nuances end up being different for different companies. For example, when I was� you know, I had an agency and we worked for a lot of companies that were small and medium businesses, they were personal trainers, gyms. They had the same 25 components. Right. We were basically kind of, like, skinning these things that were very reusable and then I went to IBM and they were similar in that they had a lot of reusable components but the concerns were different. I was on IBM cloud and it was a dashboarding thing. I was there as carbon design was hitting maturity. They were a team that sat next to us in Austin. And it was really interesting to watch the way that they thought about things because my team had sort of built these libraries that were really reusable for us. Then I went to IBM, where the carbon design system team was building components that needed to be really reusable for not them. They didn't build with carbon design. They built carbon design for me to consume it and use it and make something that worked and the difference is how you have to think about that� IBM, we had teams building in Vue, Angular, all of that needed to work so they're shipping a web components version, they're shaping an Angular/Vue/React version. Relying on how do you get the colors in? Make sure the border radius is good. What a nightmare of a situation to walk into and to have to make sense and yet they managed to do� I mean, I think�

BRAD FROST: They did a damn good job. Yeah. [Laughter]. Yeah. But that's just it. And it's like, the multiframework thing is part of it. But� but, we call it the multi� all the things� organization. We're talking multibrand, subbrands, multiple product families. So, you got your marketing sites, but your more dashboardy things, your enterprise. You have campaigns, white labeling, you have dark mode and different color modes. You have all sorts of stuff that are sitting on that, internationalization, localization, you name it. And everyone has a different flavor or specific, unique version of what they need to support. And so, I love how you said it. It's like, it's� it is all the same stuff, but at the same time, there's a lot of nuance in it and that's kind of like what led to� what led to Atomic Design was a recognition of that nuance, which is�

JASON LENGSTORF: Right.

BRAD FROST: Yeah. Take literally any of IBM's experiences, take any of your personal trainer websites, take any of the websites I've worked on or anybody listening to this has ever worked on, as well as bank kiosks, you can explode those experiences and be left with this finite set of fundamental building blocks to make that user interface. And that was kind of the world where we kind of, in 2013, the responsive design world was, like, okay, components is a thing. There's, like, this idea of patterns and Bootstrap had come out and it's like, here's components and you can build stuff with them and� to some degree� that's still the story being told a little bit. I was like well, we would be a little bit more thoughtforward, a little bit nuanced on how we think about this stuff because it really is� we can break these down into building blocks� what I call "atoms," to form components, a label, an input and a note about that input and those are all traveling together as a group and those take on their own, unique properties and they have a relationship to one another in the same way two hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom do. So, the simple things and then those get combined into these relativelycomplex components that I call "organisms" and from there, you apply those to an actual layout that looks like a screen, I call that a template. And basically, the individual pages that have a certain, you know, type of content or state, application state or different user roles, that's kind of playing out at the page level. And so it's that� addressing that dynamic you're describing with the carbon team. There's this kind of disconnectedness that tends to happen with design system teams now, where it's like, they are in their own, little ivory tower. We're building this stuff for other people to use, as you said. How the hell do we make sure it actually builds the right things.

JASON LENGSTORF: This kind of points to one of the things that I wanted to bring up� and why the title of the episode is How to Make a Design System That�s Not Boring. When we ran into these challenges with, like� we saw� like, a lot of things were the same. We don't necessarily want to be reinventing every component from first principles. Bootstrap and Material Design. These were huge, like, it got to the point where you started to� like, you could just tell, like, this is a Bootstrap site, this is a Material Design site. We got a lot of common patterns. We really solved what we called "mystery meat" navigation. The downside of this is it made every website boring. They all looked exactly the same. We didn't have character. There wasn't the GeoCities charm, sure, it's chaos, but it's your chaos. We did this cookiecutter website and, there you go. Materially, it's not different from a UI standpoint.
But then there's the other extreme of this, where we got so tokenized that I feel like it's equally unusable until you build your own superstructures on this and a good examine of this is Tailwind. Everything you can do with programming is available with a Tailwind class. And they use it. Obviously, you're still� everything is still very bespoke. You built an abstraction or CSS so when you're talking about the Atomic Design principles, maybe the biggest question I have is, how are you drawing the line between, like, not enough or too much and how do you make sure that the thing you're creating doesn't suck all of the creativity and personalities with the people who use and what they're assembling. Have you noticed heuristics or rules that help with this or you have to catch the nuance and your taste is what determines that?

BRAD FROST: This is great. This is the art form, I think, of it all because� because those ends of the spectrum, I think you did a great job at describing. I think that what we're� I'll put a few things on the table that are basically what we found to help. So, design tokens is an important ingredient in helping, again, decouple the door frame from the paint choice. Right. And that's what ended up happening with the Bootstraps and the Materials. People were like, I want a functioning door, I want a highquality door frame, I want an accordion that opens and closes and I have this need for this thing and I don't want to have to build it myself and, well, here's this thing and, oh, by adopting this thing, I get this ripple effect on my buttons. I want a functional door and I guess I'll take the one that comes in turquoise and I'll figure out how to peel off the paint and paint over it, but that's extra labor, right.
That's what we seen� boy, oh, boy, have we seen some jackedup Bootstrap site. Here's the site and here's the code to undo. [Laughter]. So that's kind of like what happened is that, like, this� when it's all kind of bunched together, you kind of end up in this bad situation and then so what ends up happening is that a lot of people are like, well, I don't want a turquoise button. I want a pink button, so I guess I'm going to have to go build a door frame from the groundup.

JASON LENGSTORF: Yeah, and you end up with this situation where the team's building the design systems almost feel like they're at odds with the teams using them because the teams are like, well, you haven't given us what we need to build what we have to build and the design system team is like, yes, work within the structures and the team's like, you're not moving fast enough. This comes down to that balance of how do we make sure we're giving enough, but not too much?

BRAD FROST: Yes. I'll put a couple of things on the table. There's a separation that comes with the design tokens that's an important ingredient of what you're discussing here. We've found it to be really, really helpful to establish, what we tend to call the "design system ecosystem," rather than the arbiter of all UI and is supposed to contain every solution for every single team, that's not a good idea. You're going to end up polluting it or making it overlybrittle. So, recognizing that and being like, okay, the core design system really is the home of the settled science. This is the stuff that is truly universal, like, meaning, here's these checkboxes and we want those things to be used by all of the people at the organization.
Not a good idea, not a good use of your life energy to create a checkbox, right. That's what that layer is doing. This is, like, the uncontroversial, the boring, the stuff that we've all done a bunch of times and we've got bigger fish to fry.

JASON LENGSTORF: And that also kind of talks about kind of that balance of, like, listen, teams, you never should� like, if you find yourself with the urge to reinvent a default browser input, don't. Like, these are the things we're choosing to not allow. Right? Obviously, like, you don't say that about a presentation card. But, like, a checkbox, the label styling, making sure your inputs have big enough text. The little things you pick up by designing UI. If your font size and an input is under 16 pixels, it causes the whole UI to zoom in when you tap it on a phone, little stuff you learn by being annoyed by it forever. Yes, put that in the design system and say, don't use anything other than this. I promise, you don't have a good enough reason to not use this. [Laughter].

BRAD FROST: Yeah, that's it. The core design system tends to err on the side of the more atomic end of the spectrum. Here are these more, kind of building blocks and this more compositions, right, which tend to be different across different product teams and stuff like that. That's where this introduction of a recipe layer is incredibly, incredibly helpful. What we've found this recipe layer to do is, again, sort of reduce or remove entirely that tension between the product team and the design system team because what� what recipes are� so� so, Material Design is Google design system. Google has Gmail, Maps, Google Docs. Wildly, wildly different products. So you don't see the, like, YouTube share bar in Material Design or you don't see the Gmail slat. Those things are all existing, sitting at this layer that is at top of the core Material Design library. Here are things that are sometimes compositions of the Material Design component. The cards need to be arranged and have a certain design. Whereas the next product needs a different card in a different order. Here's the product card or the related video card or the event card. That's this recipe layer, gives product teams ownership and agency and autonomy to be able to create, influence and form UI at this layer that helps them build great products without abandoning the system, right. Without abandoning the core design system so that helps draw cleaner boundaries between who owns what, who's responsible for what and what to do when product teams come to the design system and they don't see what they need. They're able to go, okay, still have a conversation and we talk a lot about governance.
At the same time, I don't see a tertiary button in the core design system and I need that and I need to ship that by the end of next spring. Go for it. Right. You own this layer. And then, it also sets� this recipe layer, architecturally and from perspective helps build the relationships. The design system team can check in on these different recipe library and go, oh, that's an interesting approach. How's that working out? I see this same solution being represented in four different product recipe libraries so maybe that's a good candid.

JASON LENGSTORF: Pull it back down. Okay. Okay. All right. I could pepper you with questions for the rest of our time, but I want to get practical with this so let me switch us over into the pair programming view here, and I'm just going to make appeal to everybody who's watching, if you are enjoying this, make sure to "like" the video, subscribe to the channel, leave a comment, share it with friends. That's how I pay for food and stuff. So, thank you. We're looking at Brad's website here. Look at this fun thing, here up at the top. I enjoy it very much. This is bradfrost.com. That is the hub for all the Brad Frost things.
You've released a course?

BRAD FROST: Yes.

JASON LENGSTORF: Do you want to talk about this for a second?

BRAD FROST: Absolutely. It's designtokenscourse.com, called Subatomic. Design tokens was coined by Jina Anne. Had design tokens been a thing, I would have put it right there. So� [Laughter]. � but conceptually, they work well. These are the subatomic pieces, the color and the typography that don't actually do anything, or mean anything, until you actually apply them to a user interface element so it's this very interesting thing. But, yeah, so, the course we have worked with so many different teams, including almost 10% of the Fortune 100 on these kinds of problems and we've worked directly with so many teams to ultimately get them to the same, general spot. [Laughter]. And so, we've, like, learned so much along the way. We've worked with Dot Dash Meredith, which owns publications, Time, Life, all these different places. Caterpillar, with its superstrong brand, Pfizer, United Airlines. Architecturally, we've done it with so many different organizations and enterprises that have said, this feels really good so we finally got it this position, with the single cost of a meeting of arguing about the naming of these tokens and stuff like that, like, we can try to give you 13 hours of videos� [Laughter]. � but also, like, the big thing is actually providing a token architecture in both Figma and in code and that are, like, perfectly in sync and the way we've actually designed the course is going through the code, sidebyside versus going, here's this thing in Figma and here's Figma variables and in the next chapter, we'll get into code. We are bringing these worlds together.

JASON LENGSTORF: Gotcha. Cool. I'll throw to your Bluesky, as well. Is that your main social driver these days?

BRAD FROST: Yeah. And LinkedIn. Although I like the old Twitter vibe of Bluesky. But, yeah, it's Brad Frost on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect there unless you're a recruiter.

JASON LENGSTORF: Unless you're a recruiter. [Laughter]. All right. So, you sent me� you sent me this, like, readymade, custom Figma thing.

BRAD FROST: Yeah. So, this is� this is from the course. So, if you go in the left sidebar, click on "color." That's a good place to start. What you can kind of see, we created a� we created a fictitious ice cream company. The way we're demonstrating the power of design tokens is through ice cream. Vanilla theme�

JASON LENGSTORF: Right after my heart.

BRAD FROST: Brandless vanilla theme. Black and white neutrals. Here's this stuff, pretty boring, pretty gray scale but then we get into our Strawberry theme, which kind of has this pink color palate and then we sort of go and have a chocolate theme and then we have a dark chocolate theme, which is our kind of�

JASON LENGSTORF: Light mode, dark mode. Nice. I'm with it.

BRAD FROST: Yeah. So probably the best thing to do from here is if you scroll from the lefthand side, you can go to "product screens." And then what you can see is, you can kind of see the� a few different screens in action, right. So, we have an Ecommerce marketing site, like, home page kind of experience and this is the vanilla theme applied.
And, then if you go here, then we have, like, a checkout flow. So, more of a utilitarian "for me" kind of page. And then we have a third screen, where�

JASON LENGSTORF: The analytics.

BRAD FROST: Yeah, yeah. Here's your dashboard, your enterprise experience. Again, this is something we've encountered so many times. Well, our Customer Excellence team has wildly different needs than our Marketing team so we're trying to show how a single token system can travel to all of these different product experiences.

JASON LENGSTORF: Yeah.

BRAD FROST: So if you click on one of these� and you might not actually have the right access...

JASON LENGSTORF: You might have to make the changes because I don't have�

BRAD FROST: All right. Yeah. Let me do that real quick. So, we're looking at it. Can I see you? Ah. I'll wave to you. All right. So, from here, what we can do is, we can actually sort of swap out the� the different color modes and so there's a dropdown where you're able to basically say, like, "change this theme to strawberry." And then you could see all of the product screens kind of updating to match that strawberry theme. I'll do the same and change it to chocolate and do the same and change it to dark chocolate.

JASON LENGSTORF: And you can see some of the pieces here, in the dark mode, like, the form has got those nice, little, quality of life things you want when you switch into dark mode as opposed to what I've seen with some design systems, you switch to dark mode, but some things are going to blow you out with a white background.

BRAD FROST: We have a little, like, playground thing in the� in the left, too, where we're basically� see if you can go there. Yeah, try to drag this across� or I could kind of� here's our kitchen sink component. But�

JASON LENGSTORF: Ooohh.

BRAD FROST: So you're able to� just like you were just saying.

JASON LENGSTORF: What?

BRAD FROST: Make sure you're doing things right and not slipping between the cracks.

JASON LENGSTORF: Okay. This is not what we're talking about today but I have so many questions about how you did this because this is so cool. [Laughter].

BRAD FROST: The short answer is this is Figma variables.

JASON LENGSTORF: You can set it to an art board?

BRAD FROST: Yeah. You assign variables and say, I want this one to be a theme of strawberry and the variables with remap themselves. It gets closer to where we've been with code for a much, much longer time.

JASON LENGSTORF: I should pay more attention to what Figma's doing. I've been drawing my rectangles and living in the stone age, apparently. [Laughter]. This is very cool.

BRAD FROST: And then I think� if you don't mind� I will� is this a private chat, in the chat, here? It says "private."

JASON LENGSTORF: The private chat, yeah.

BRAD FROST: I'm going to share that with you. And the password, if you could just not share that. This is� all right. That's the password there.

JASON LENGSTORF: Got it.

BRAD FROST: So, this is the� this link, here�

JASON LENGSTORF: Pull this up real quick and get�

BRAD FROST: Yeah. So that was the Figma side of it and then basically the code side of it is a� is a Storybook instance, right, that basically shows the exact same thing. So, if you sort of scroll� yeah, you might need to x out of a couple of things just to make some space there. Now you can even close that Controls panel at the bottom and we'll get some real estate there.
Here's our vanilla theme and the tokens for that. But then in the top, you can see there's a little dropdown, right. So now you can kind of change that and see, here's the tokens and code for that and so on and so forth so this is the exact same thing as what we were looking at in Figma. But then if you scroll down to the bottom of the Storybook sidebar, all the way down, go to home page. Home page is always a sexy one. Now do that same switching�

JASON LENGSTORF: Zoomies.

BRAD FROST: Yeah, interactivity because Figma and the browser are not the same, as we know.

JASON LENGSTORF: Right. And then we can� love it. Love it.

BRAD FROST: So, yeah. It's basically, like, trying to paint this picture of, this is what we're trying to establish with a solid design system and design token is that designers are using these ingredients, right. Are using these tokens to create these branded, highquality, visual UX best practices and then developers are using those to build the experiences. There are things that are experientially different. This is the browser and the static design tool. At the same time, it's really about this shared language and wielding design tokens to disseminate best design practices.

JASON LENGSTORF: This is nice, too. When you start getting into the design tokens, now that Figma does have variables, there's even tools that will try to sync your Storybook components into Figma, as components so that you can�

BRAD FROST: And vice versa.

JASON LENGSTORF: You're able to maintain in the one place, wherever your team considers the source of truth to be and make it easier to do all that kind of� I think that is superhelpful.

BRAD FROST: Yeah. And we� we have, like, a whole section of the course on that because we've seen� it's like one of the first things that comes up is, like, immediately people go to, "how do we automate and synchronize between these worlds?" That one's a little� maybe not the best example. If you go to "button" or any of these here.

JASON LENGSTORF: You can see the chart. I love this. It's nice to flip through and see what's available and make decisions on, okay, I see how this would work and you can go shop. Shopping for things is� is very helpful for me. Like, being able to see what I can even do and I also really like that it's sort of� so� so, let me see if I understand this in Atomic Design Principle. The atoms are these kind of things?

BRAD FROST: I'll stop you right there.

JASON LENGSTORF: I'm already wrong. [Laughter].

BRAD FROST: It's a little bit mixing metaphors, which is hard. That's the hard thing about this stuff. I kind of step in it every time because I'm out there, throwing around a bunch of metaphors all the time so people� [Laughter]. You are certainly not the first, I'll just say that. So, this�

JASON LENGSTORF: Which one of these is the door frame?
[Laughter].

BRAD FROST: If you go to the button and hit the vanilla theme, that's our door frame. Right. So, it's like if you strip away the chocolate theme from that, you will get your� this is our door frame. Right. This is what we mean by a primary button is, like, semantically, it means that it's this thing that's meant to be� to kind of stand out as a thing, right. We just have a default button, that's your runofthemill stuff. There's a default or a "none defined." That is providing the door frame, which is structural in nature. If we have a button with an icon, that icon is going to sit next to the button text. That's the equivalent of the hinges needing to be on the right or the left in order for the door to function. So that's kind of what we're talking about, we're drawing a line in CSS, specifically, between styles, display grid thing. That is entirely a structural component, a gridtype thing. That's not doing anything aesthetic, that's controlling its layout and we want that to be sturdy. We don't necessarily want that to be branded even though you can kind of get into stuff. These are the door frames, unstyled, stripped down, not bringing any ripples pastels. From the exercise of feeding different token themes through these components that we get the results that�

JASON LENGSTORF: Nice. Okay.

BRAD FROST: So, I'll put one more thing on the table because you're starting to get into it. If you like at design tokens, we have these three tiers and this is, like, how this magic trick works. So, the three tiers of a token system are what kind of unlocks this stuff and basically, the Tier 1 level of a token system is describing the available ingredients you have to work with. Just like the things in a restaurant's kitchen and in the pantry, for every dish, you're not going to use everything that's on those shelves. Right. That's what you have to work with. Right. That's what's in stock and that analogy or a metaphor of a restaurant is important because that's, like, in the back room that the cooks. You don't want a restaurant patron to kick open the double doors and grab a big thing of flour. You'd be like, what the hell are you doing? You're going to make a mess for all of us.
So, Tier 1 are really these raw ingredients and then what we're doing, at the Tier 2 level is we're actually mapping those and giving those tokens jobs to do in a user interface.

JASON LENGSTORF: Oooh, okay. Okay.

BRAD FROST: Theme, color, background, default. Right. That's applied to the body. Right. That's applied to the body of the interface see whatever's in that slot is going to show up on your body. Right. So, for a dark mode theme, right, for the dark chocolate theme, if you switch that theme switcher, you'll see the color default is set to a dark color. If you get to the content colors, this is, like, where we're able to really ensure that the� that the content that's sitting on top of it is of sufficient contrast and we're able to create accessible experiences because we have theme, color, content default. So, content default is sitting on top of background default so these things are traveling together so that we're always� so that we're able to ensure that things always kind of render the right results.

JASON LENGSTORF: Got it. Okay. Cool. So, this is� what I like about this is these are the sorts of things that� these ideas have sort of successfully disseminated out into the community where I do a broken version of this instinctively now, where I sort of, like, set up colors and then I'm like, okay, what do I use these colors for? This is my text. This is my heading. I'm not being nearly as thoughtful. What if it's on this background or that background.

BRAD FROST: The poor man's version of that is fine. That might be all you need and that's perfectly acceptable. That's one of the things we drive home again and again and again in the course. What we're looking for is enterprisegrade. Your token system might quite literally be, you know, here's a handful of colors that are coming from whatever, Open Props or Tailwind or Material and you basically say, you know, "color primary, color secondary." Maybe that's all your system needs to be and that is perfectly acceptable.

JASON LENGSTORF: It sort of feels like the approach would be, whether you're a big team or a small team, you kind of start with what you know to be true and as you observe things, as you observe the desire pacts being worn in, you can pave those. We sort of land on, like, some consistent colors but then people will grab their colors using the color picker so you have subtle variations in gray that just make life a little messier. If you do a rebrand, you kind find and replace because� one or two points off and so now you really got to go look at everything and it makes these sorts of things really hard. So as you see a theme emerge, oh, we always use this font for our headings. Great, now you go you can turn that into a token and confidently say everything using this font is font heading. Oh, great. Now if I refactor, I'm confident it'll use the right font and those start to feel clean as opposed to� I don't know. I had this really good conversation with Dan Mall about emergent design versus intentional design and how you kind of can't have one without the other when you're working with teams because if you sit down and you're very scientifically, this is the design system, you send it out into the world and it falls apart immediately. You made it academically and not practically. You kind of have to have this balance of moving between "observe and see what happens. And prune it." It's like gardening, really.

BRAD FROST: Dan and I collaborated, I feel like, for many years. We're not� we're both not of the mindset of it's design systems that are boring. We both kind of come from the agency world and a lot of more like highimpact kind of stuff so it was really kind of fun to simultaneously play with that real expressiveness and that branded experience but also at the end of the day, these systems are very pragmaticallydriven and that's one of the things that I love to remind people of. People tend to think of things as design system equals design and we don't need that fire power.
Like, true. Absolutely. But, do you have a website with more than one web page? Well, you need to figure out how to get that header and that footer from that first page over to the second page. Right. So very, very quickly, components and, like, sort of capturing these decisions and creating some semblance of systems is good practice.

JASON LENGSTORF: It's that old adage, if you're not using a framework, you're building one. I think it's the same with this. If you're not using a design system, you're building one. In order to update the website, you had to copypaste every change which is, again, kind of one of those archaic charm things about the old web, whereas you would click through, the older the pages got, the funnier the design would get because you'd do this step through time�

BRAD FROST: I call them "Benjamin Button designs." [Laughter].

JASON LENGSTORF: Today. Practically, there's zero chance you're not using a design system. It's whether it has been intentionally created and thought through from a "can anybody but me understand this? Could I ask for help?" Are the teams being forced to create a design system as they're working? We want them to ship the things we ask them to build.

BRAD FROST: One of the real superpowers that come with design token systems and treating them as a kind of distinct product compared to the component system, so with all of these enterprises that we've worked with and what you described at IBM, you have every framework at play under the sun. To ask the team, hey, we're doing web components now. You need to stop shipping your product and refactor to get this� this total parallel or lateral move in order for you to be using this component library, which is not a great use of time. Now that said, opportunistically, if you are touching something, it makes sense to pull that in a pragmatic and thoughtful way. The thing is, with design tokens, what those teams might not be on the hook to do is, hey, you need to design the components design system. They've already built all of those things, but then this happens, which is, well, our agency of record rolled out our rebrand, our redesign, and you all need to update to introduce the new brand and everybody goes, uhhh. Those are giant, huge, multimilliondollar affairs. All the product teams are kicking and screaming and stuff because they see it as a chore, the brand, you know, leader, the VP of brand, the CMO is cracking the whip. Everybody is trying to make this stuff happen and they're seeing it as this� as this chore. Right. But they don't want� it's very risky to start going in and start touching and blowing up their component system so what we've found these design token systems to be is this really great, sort of dipping your toes into the water of adopting the design system. It's like design system adoption lite, where you're able to go, here's the token system, rip out your old values. You don't even need to rip out your old values. You just need to remap those existing variables to the new token system.
We did this with Caterpillar, they had SaaS in there set to "cat's really famous color of yellow. "What we did to help them adopt the design system, instead of that being "dollar sign cat yellow," it was mapped to the CSS custom property.

JASON LENGSTORF: Yeah, I think that's great.

BRAD FROST: It's, like, a really accessible, pragmatic way of starting to ingest the system and the cool thing is, they're able to get all of that multitheming and whatever else kind of comes from the token system for free with pretty minimum amount of work, which we found to be a way easier sale than trying to be like, you have to do this to your component library.

JASON LENGSTORF: I think that's also one of those things� what we're thinking about, as the team that's rolling out the design system initiative� is, oh, we're going to just quickly swap everything out and inevitably, you find the corner cases. We have to refactor things to use the React paradigms so it's going to take us six, seven, eight months. It's rarely practical to go allin on a, rip the whole UI out. But it is pretty practical to say, hey, if you're going to go touch a corner of the UI, take a minute and swap out all of the hardcoded values to use these design tokens and if you're touching thing that's using a new component, swap in the new thing and later on, when we have changes for you, you don't have to do any work. You can just update the design system library and it's going to automatically give you all these changes.
If the ticket touches something that hasn't been updated for a while, if it doesn't have any weird logic that's tied to the framework that we'd have to do a lot of work to back out, just switch it and see what happens. If you can spend 20 minutes replacing this component� we'll eventually touch the UI. At now point did we have to stop production to do the rip and replace and we get all this free maintenance stuff. Granted, when do companies have enough of an attention span to stay on something for two years and fund a design system team. There's so much calculus you have to do in any of these situations because they're all going to be different and weird and all the politics are strange. But in an ideal work, where everyone is rowing in the same direction, this is a really effective way to roll things out.

BRAD FROST: I love how you described that. Dare I say, it sounds downright sensible.

JASON LENGSTORF: I always laugh, though, because I every time I describe thing, in my head, I'm like, if everybody thought like me, that's what's happening in all these meetings.

BRAD FROST: The human, like� as a consultant, right, I've gotten to see people's protectiveness and opinions about decisions they've made or things they feel very strongly about. It's really fascinating. It's a window into the world of people's minds and what, you know, they're trying to protect and what they get defensive about and what they get annoyed by and there's a real pragmatism, I think, that, in this kind of "here's this," this is helpful and it's our express goal to help you. And, like� reframing, carrying that attention. That's not to say that brand officer, we need to get that out there. There's a real opportunity to just be like, hey, yeah, here are these pragmatic ways you can start, you know, we want to partner with you, we want to collaborate with you, we want to work with you and we want to betterunderstand what you're up to because we actually have some tools and some things that will make your work go better, smoother, faster and yield better results.
That said, you know, if you're like, I feel incredibly proud of this stuff thought we're doing� and we're not touching this� I think it's� I've learned over the years to be like, obviously, hash it out and have a spirited conversation about it, but at the end of the day, it's like, I try to be really, really careful about� I think you mentioned it in our correspondence, the policing thing. You really want to get away from that and evolve into a real customer service model. But beyond customer service model, like, just being, like, I'm a human being and I'm, like, working on stuff that's here to help you, another human being that I care about and want to help. So, it's like, I try to� that's the thing that I really try to instill.

JASON LENGSTORF: I think that's such a good way to go about it. I agree. It's never fun to be, like, the team code cop. Right. It doesn't matter what it is. If you are enforcing, like, you know, before we had things like Prettier and ESLint, it's never fun because your whole job eventually becomes, go yell at everyone else and dynamically change the team.
I've got a blog post on this buried somewhere, make the right thing the easy thing. I've heard this described a thousand ways, the pit of success, the cow paths, whatever it is. If you can make it so that if somebody chooses to do things the right way, it will make them faster and do less work, they will eventually make that choice. You just kind of drift toward optimization and if you can smooth a groove where if everybody gets in that groove, they're getting paged less, they're going to take that path. If you find yourself trying to build something and getting anybody to use your thing is a huge battle, it's probably the way you've designed it. You probably haven't found a way to make it the easy thing yet.

BRAD FROST: And that's why the human connection matters so much. People will be like, we have this thing built and nobody wants to use it. You need to do the work of helping them understand, hey, this thing exists. That's, like, Step 1. Step 2 is saying, we know this is new, this is different and understandably, people when presented with new, different things, hey, Jason, I want you to radicallytransform your workflow. I don't understand it, he said no. [Laughter]. It's like, you need to build that trust, you need to build that rapport. You need to help them to get to a place where they're in a position.

JASON LENGSTORF: Coming at it from a point of empathy, the battlefield of codebases is strewn by the nonsense that gets created. If we just change all this stuff, it'll make everything better and inevitably, they don't follow all the way through and we end up with tech debt on tech debt on tech debt because somebody had a vision and what reason does anybody have to trust me to follow through. Everybody makes that promise. If you just do this, your life's going to be easier. You have to be able to lead with real examples and making sure what you're asking people to do is small and it's immediately going to get them results they can look at and go, oh, you're right, this is working.
When I was at Netlify, one of the things we were running on, we had a docs page. We had a marketing site. And we had our actual app, like, the app.netlify.com. Each of these was running on a slightlydifferent version of design so colors were a little bit off. Typography wasn't quite right. This was a product of� early on, everybody's working fast. We start updating the marketing page but we don't have time to pull that in it to the app. The docs page, we didn't have anyone doing that. Over time, we got to the point where we're like, we want to roll this out. They're like, we can't, we don't have time to work on all three sites. This was a constant point of tension in the company. We hate the way this looks, but it's too much work to fix. It's crossfunctional and all those things.
One of the things I realized, maybe this is what being a VP is all about, I talked to the right people on each of the teams and said, hey, if I borrowed three people off your team for a week and put them in a week and put them in a room with other people, could we solve this in a way to move forward? I got our VP of marketing to take over her house for a week and did a thing called web cohesion week and had 1520 people, including the stakeholders, so that they could all make decisions fast and all we did was implement design tokens. The whole company got on a shared set of colors, a shared set of typography, a shared set of spacing. We didn't introduce a component library. We were just cleaning up so they all looked like the same website.
The fallout of that though was the teams were able to implement things fast and when we did a rebrand, later� it was, like, the last thing that happened as I was leaving the company� it went shockingly smooth because everybody had the foundations in place. This week of pain ended up paying so many dividends and it really� it's one of those things, it's like, could I have gotten the buyin to have taken a month? Almost certainly not? What's the smallest chunk you can do, that people will actually give you permission to do? You can carve out the time and make progress so people can feel it. You got really lasting change in place.

BRAD FROST: That's beautiful. I love that on so many levels. I'll give you a couple things that's stuck out to me. One is, that recognition and that doing the work to pull different groups of people together. That's amazing and takes a lot of tech. Congratulations. That's the actual terrain of doing good technical work.

JASON LENGSTORF: 95% of this job is getting people to talk to you. [Laughter].

BRAD FROST: Right. And I think this is one of the things that's just like, I don't give a shit what these blues or seafoam greens are. The thing is, what we want is the� is the� the decision. Right. Is the result of that. And I think that that's really beautiful because a lot of times, that is weird. Another thing is you call it a week of pain. You could easily say, well, that week of pain� I would reframe it and maybe not even say "pain." Sure, it's hard work, but at the end of the day, you're talking about alleviating months and months� if not years and years�

JASON LENGSTORF: The joke is, we called it "pain," but we branded it. All the people that we worked with, they all ended up being closer as a result of it.

BRAD FROST: That's it, right there.

JASON LENGSTORF: It really does build these team connections.

BRAD FROST: And quite literally, the connective tissue. So, you're building the relationship, human relationships, the architectural relationship and once you have those relationships established, you can pave those cow paths and continue doing that and you bring that stuff together, you show that it's successful. You just do it again and you do it again to the point where you're like, oh, wow, we're all really aligned and we're figuring out what's shared versus what's different and nobody's just lobbing things out but we're actually able to listen to each other and figure out what we're all doing and what our priorities are.
There's this� again, this little connective tissue that can be the real ground work for, like, a superhealthy culture and our experience, when we� and that's why we dig on Atomic Design so much and building through real things.

JASON LENGSTORF: Right.

BRAD FROST: So much. People are like, I don't understand, we created the token system, nobody wants to use it. We're shopping around. You got to get that relationship going. You got to get that connective tissue in there.

JASON LENGSTORF: I had a similar experience at IBM where I showed up and the teams didn't talk. I'm one of the people that shouldn't be RTO. I'm so much less productive in an office because I just want to chat. I would go in. One of the things that was an accidental lesson for me was how important the interpersonal connections were. I had heard these teams didn't get along. I'd walk around the floor and say, hey, what are you doing for lunch? Come with me. I would get people from different teams together. They would talk about what's frustrating and they would be like, oh, we might have something that work for that. They're sending each other ideas and sharing codebases.
Somebody came to me and was like, how do you build relationships like that? I was like, man, I was eating tacos. I just didn't want to eat alone. [Laughter].

BRAD FROST: It's beautiful.

JASON LENGSTORF: Those little things, no amount of structure or academic correctness or code perfection is going to paper over the fact that if people don't know it exists, if people don't have any reason to trust you, if people aren't confident that you have their best interest in mind, they're never going to use it. Right. This is� this is the standing battle. You know, you got to go in and just show people, I'm here because I see some pain and I've experienced that pain because I've worked in these systems before and I have this step that we can take that's going to make it easier and if people believe you, it works. And if they don't, you're dead in the water. It doesn't matter how good your system is.

BRAD FROST: It's so funny. I've had so many conversations that started with people� the guard is totally up. You know, they're just immediately� and so much of it, you know, hate to like use this as a parallel, but it's like a dog that's been mistreated. You approach it, they shy away. You can totally see that.

JASON LENGSTORF: We're going to do a redesign and they're 10,000 yards. We've been here before.

BRAD FROST: The human equivalent of the tail tucked under the dog. You have to be like, it's okay. It's okay. I'm here. It's okay.

JASON LENGSTORF: I promise you, we have snacks. Snacks and cuddles. [Laughter].

BRAD FROST: You said something really important there, the technical merits is, like, what I think a lot of developers tend to, like, lean in on and, like, split hairs about and have their holy wars or whatever. I honestly don't care. In fact, I love mustache and handlebars. We could build a very, very functional and beautiful and amazing experience using relativelyancient technology and what makes or breaks this thing is not the choice of templating language or CSS. It has everything to do with our relationship.
What I'm witnessing now� one of the reasons I wanted to show you the Figma angle of this is that nowhere more do I see this disparity and this disconnectedness is between the worlds of design and development right now.
I have, you know, really strong feelings about this� about� what I feel to be the kind of fundamental brokenness of the designer/developer workflow right now, where you are basically like, what's the� what's the MCP or the� how do we, like, kick this stuff out of the API? Or here's Dev Mode? We're treating collaboration between disciplines as a toggle switch.

JASON LENGSTORF: Right.

BRAD FROST: And once upon a time, back to your taco conversation, those designers had to bother us because Photo shop or earlier versions of Sketch weren't able to make the responsive experiences or paint as full a picture as these tools do now and we've kind of crossed over this threshold� my hypothesis is Figma's gotten to this "good enough" state where designers can just kind of hang out in their comfort zone and the way that these processes are often structured is that they're upstream from the developers so they're, like, putting their headphones on, they're doing their thing, getting their approval and it's now it's like, oh, yeah, ready for develop, switch the toggle switch and implement this and unsurprisingly, people are going, oh, my developers are having issues, you know. [Laughter].

JASON LENGSTORF: But I think you're touching on sort of the core challenge that I wanted to dig into on this show, which is that this is how design systems become boring. If somebody who is not in the� in the process of building is making decisions, sort of absent context, things necessarily have to be sterile. You're designing something that won't work or is general purpose that it can't have character so the designers and the developers working in collaboration, talking through, "when we try to use this, it doesn't work because this feels off." Or hearing the users or watching the users go through something and they didn't realize this was interactive because it looks like a static card, you can go back and say, hey, how do we fix that? And suddenly, you're having a conversation and workflow that's useful in your app, not the thing you academically decided is a plutonic idea for the internet.
This is where magic happens. If you are taking capable people with a diverse set of skills and you're putting them on a problem that's unique to them, you're going to get a solution that is unique and interesting and solves that problem in a novel way. If you take those same people and put them in a silo and say, solve this problem the best way you know how with your expertise, they have to play defensively.

BRAD FROST: 100%. And what's fascinating is that what I witness is, again, this kind of thing that's calcified in many organizations is, design is upstream from development. I feel like that's a pretty uncontroversial thing to say. Meanwhile, the tools and stuff are so wildly more immature than what we've been doing. So, for design token specifically, Figma variables came out two years ago, two summers ago. You have a bunch of designers who have been used to layer 46 copy 32. You know, designers not necessarily historically known for rigorous naming conventions and things like that. All of a sudden, being given this task of creating these token systems using these tools. And, well, you know who does have a lot of experience naming variables and giving names for colors and typography? Developers do. [Laughter]. So this is� this is, my call to action for any developer listening to this show. You have this massive opportunity to participate in the design process and to help with the structure, to help guide, to help be that Sherpa, to help people who are relativelynew to this experience, show them the ropes, show them how it's done. Don't take the given workflow as a given. You literally have to break the rules in order to just� like, I could respond to this ticket or I could leave the comment, per the process or whatever, but make the call. Get on a call with them. Roll over to their desk if you're colocated. Make the human connection and you will save yourselves so much time, money, agony and, like you said, build those better relationships that last well beyond the outcome of that particular conversation.
So, it's like, developers, I feel like� it's� there's a lot of reasons why this unhealthy dynamic has calcified, but it's everyone's responsibility to reframe it and break the� this mold because it's not healthy at all and I'd say more than design systems as a concept, that's the boring design part is, we have this, like, shitty process, the shitty waterfall process that's taken route. Totally unimaginative things. Developers, not just designers, also like you said, a diverse product team coming with all of their full selves, including their knitting interests and their three cats and their fluency in four languages or whatever those things are at a human level, it's that alchemy, putting everyone in those silos, like you said, is a great recipe for getting boring and lackluster results.

JASON LENGSTORF: I could not have said that better myself.

BRAD FROST: Thank you for letting me rant, I love this. [Laughter].

JASON LENGSTORF: I have completely failed to define the format so we just play it by ear. [Laughter].

BRAD FROST: Again, we're from the same cloth. Yeah, that's how I roll, too, is usually, like, uh, let's figure it out. And that's, I think� that also speaks to it. We talked about defensiveness and guardrails and all that stuff. I think, kind of like with these design token systems and most work, you want these things to be rigorous. You want these things to be good and sound and true but there is� there's, like, a lot of fearbased formality and a lot of weird processes and stuff that gets built up around making products that gets in the way of doing good work.

JASON LENGSTORF: I think that the thing that is really challenges is recognizing that every one of these things is done with good intentions. Like, we make design systems because the intention is to make it possible for everybody to do a good job without having to be a worldclass designer. We make processes because we want to make sure that things are consistent and that there's fair treatment and that people have the same experience when they work at the company. But each of those things is, like, they happen in response to a sort of human failure, right. And a lot of times, that human failure is just scale. You get to a certain size and you can't possibly know all your coworkers and you can't build close relationships and process is how we control for keeping those things consistent. I think we reach for these things too soon because the thought of having to actively collaborate is too hard to define and we sort of resist it. Remembering that neither of these things is inherently good or bad. It's the way that they're applied is what gets the outcome and if all we do is hang out and be best friends and everybody's having a great time, but there's, like, no rigor to the way we do things, we're in a lot of trouble. If all we do is process and nobody knows their coworkers' name, that's also not good. The answer is somewhere in between. You want to work with real people, with real interests and passions and, you know, like, a third dimension. And, you want to have enough structure around the way that you build, that you're not inventing everything from first principles every time you collaborate.

BRAD FROST: 100%. Working as a consultant and working with teams, what I ended up finding was returning to society after COVID. It's like, we're all still, I think, kind of learning how to relate to one another and be with one another and talk to people. And I think that� that what you described, and the stories you shared� one of the things I really value and love to do is to just go in and kind of inject that healthy dose of humanity and talk about tacos and anything but the work because that's actually really, really valuable. Eventually, you need to get to that work but I've found that giving people an excuse and modeling that and showing people how to show up and just talk to each other, to say, like, rather than go through Slack or Teams or replying to each other in the ticket, to just� I could show you what a fiveminute call looks like, where you actually hash through it together and get the same result. And that is, it's at first, a weird thing to say, hey, I know I could just ask you this over text and that's the convenient way to do it. You're doing this important labor to get closer to another human being and to be cognizant of that makes work and life so much more enjoyable. Interact with people inperson and not through toggle switches.

JASON LENGSTORF: Yes. Yes, especially in a world where every business seems to have an underlying premise of let's add some technology layer that allows us to not have to meet people, leave our house, have conversations, have interpersonal relationships of any sort. The ability to build and maintain interpersonal relationships always has been one of the greatest strengths that you can have in your life, in your career, in every aspect of being a human.

BRAD FROST: Yes.

JASON LENGSTORF: As we move into a world where we're actively disincentivizing everybody from learning those skills, it's going to be an exceedingly rare and extremely beneficial skill to have built, so more than ever, now is the time to lean into this and getting comfortable with the idea of, can I walk up to somebody and be cool with them? A conversation, not have a motive. I don't have a reason to talk to you, other than you seem cool.

BRAD FROST: I'm curious, I'm interested, what are you up to and making that connection. Yeah. With no� with no thing in your back pocket that you're trying to bust out.

JASON LENGSTORF: And if the question you're asking, as I say this, is "what's in it for me?" A life that you'll enjoy and all of these people will be in positions will say, I met Jason here and he did this and we should call him. It leads to opportunities. It leads to things that will enhance your life. If you're going in for that, you're never going to get to the point. You are there to build relationships because it allows you to have a network of people that there's a foundation of trust. Everything good is stemming from that, whether that's the ability to execute well on projects at work, whether it's the network that helps you get your next career step, whether it's somebody who's going to show up on your birthday. It comes from the willingness to have a real conversation with somebody and be interested in them beyond what they can do for you, what they can provide for you right now.

BRAD FROST: I love it. It is absolutely possible to cultivate that in your world, you know, start wherever is comfortable but it is that, like, kind of, if it's not in your nature, if you're not hardwired for extroverted� it's not to say you need to be an extrovert or whatever. You need to overcome that real, initial trepidation or that social awkwardness and I'm the guy in the elevator, breaking the silence. I'm the guy� I just got back from a trip and all these people are taking these beautiful, you know, pictures of these amazing places, these mountains and glacier lakes and I'm the person that goes, can I take your guys' picture? They're like, no, no, no. I'm like, please, please, I insist. I always insist upon it and then� because I know. Because I know. They're only reacting to that initial� that's weird.

JASON LENGSTORF: I don't want to be an inconvenience.

BRAD FROST: You have to puncture that and that is a skill that you can cultivate and like you said, it's going to serve you so well in every aspects of your life.

JASON LENGSTORF: What a great point to end it on. I don't think we're going to take it any further than that and unfortunately, we're out of time. Let me bring up, real quickly, there were a few things for people who want to go further, the mechanics of this. Let me bring up the link to the Subatomic course. Maybe learn the nuts and bolts of what we're talking about as you are practicing the human side of it, as well. Go give Brad a follow on Bluesky. And, also, check out� you had some other things you sent me, if you want to talk about these as I'm throwing links up.

BRAD FROST: We talked about Figma variables, which is how you do tokens in the Figma world. And then Style Dictionary is a tool where you describe your tokens in platformagnostic ways, in JSON or YAML. It will spit it out in any format you need.
And then� so that's the kind of, we'll say "goto" tool for doing that kind of work. Stu Robson, who's a UKbased developer, he has design tokens for a long time. So, this little GitHub repo has tons of different tools and articles and resources all about design tokens.
So, Stu's awesome.
There is a W3C design tokens working group that is establishing. They have been at this for a number of years now and they've made some really great progress and that's all unlocking the ability for these tools and systems and people to get closer together and speak the same language.
Donnie has recently released this one called "designtokens.fyi." Those are good community resources for people who want to go out there.
Put a bow on it, our course, it's like we're bringing literally all of this together. It's like, here's the concepts; here's the stepbystep on how to do this stuff. We have governance diagrams, getting at those questions, when do you add a new thing to the system versus when do you deviate from the system? We have workflows and, like, kind of governance diagrams and all sorts of stuff that we offer with the course.
Oh, and I created� we created a coupon code called CodeTV Is Awesome.

JASON LENGSTORF: Is that uppercase?

BRAD FROST: Do allcaps because we're shouting it.

JASON LENGSTORF: This is your code if you want to get in there.

BRAD FROST: And this will give you 20% off.

JASON LENGSTORF: Nice, y'all. Any of the links I just shared are going to be available in the Discord. The link is up on the screen now. Any upcoming events, when we release new content, it goes to the Discord. Also, if you are interested in helping me design CodeTV merch, that's what we're talking about. Get this discount on Subatomic and check out what's coming up on Learn With Jason Web Dev Challenge and as always, if you have� if you've enjoyed this, make sure you hit the subscribe button, give it a "like." Comment, share it with your friends.
Brad, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. This episode has been livecaptioned. Thank you to Vanessa, from White Coat Captioning, for being here today. We are over time. So I'm going to wrap this one up.
Brad, any last words before I turn this off?

BRAD FROST: Keep doing your thing, man. Thanks so much for having me.

JASON LENGSTORF: Thanks so much. We will see you next time.