📍 Chicago, IL | 🎨 Product Designer & Design Technologist

I build design systems and apps that bring clarity and accessibility to complex problems. I'm fluent in Figma and code. I'm a Cursor evangelist and builder of big and tiny ideas.

• 🏛️ Neumo/GovOS Design System — Designed 32 WCAG 2.2 AA compliant components, a full design token architecture (color, typography, spacing, iconography), and responsive web guidance. Powers a complete redesign of Colorado's business tax portal (200K+ taxpayers), a document e-recording platform, and platform-level authentication flows across 6+ products and 10+ dev frameworks.

• 📊 Nielsen Global Design System — My first enterprise design system build. I built 45 components to align 40+ enterprise apps and 25+ designers. The system was built in React and Web Components and distributed across all tech stacks all over the globe. The system was the foundation for Nielsen One, a new, aligned suite of global product offerings built on a modern UI platform. I collaborated with engineers and data scientists all over the org to build scalable data visualization patterns and reporting colors optimized for clarity and decision making. The system was built to adhere to WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards and with worldwide localization including support for RTL.

• 🌐 bradsiefert.com — My design portfolio
• 📷 photos.bradsiefert.com — My photography portfolio
• 📖 10years.photos.bradsiefert.com — A photo book documenting my first decade of photography
• 💘 heybrad.lol — A dating website I built for myself to enhance my Hinge profile
• 🃏 Pokerseeker — A poker game I conceived of that combines Boggle and Poker
• 👶 Kid Quotes — An anonomized version of a web app I of my kid's quotes and stories
• 📱 shortcuts.directory — Curated collections of the best links about Apple's Siri Shortcuts application
• 🛠️ Design Tokens Viewer — A canvas app to view and search for design tokens in a design system (work in progress)
• 💼 Random City of Chicago Employee — A tiny app that show Random Chicago City of Chicago employee. Data from data.gov
• 🍽️ Mays Chicago Restaurant List — Football writer Robert Mays curates a Chicago restaurant list, I built a web app for it
• 🧱 Neumorphic Starter — A neumorphic style blog/portfolio starter template

1. Building software is never easy, but friction is removable. You can build faster and with higher quality over time if you prioritize care and discipline.
2. Great design systems aren't component libraries, they're the strategic combination of UI elements and product decisions that helps product, design, and engineering teams ship better faster.
3. Having a great design system is more important than ever. Without one, AI will generate inconsistency and technical debt faster than any team can clean it up.
4. The gap between Figma and the codebase is where quality goes to die. Designers who can code or prompt can help close that gap.
5. Perfectly crafted Figma files are dead. If designers aren't creating working prototypes in code, they are wasting time.
6. AI accelerates creating more of everything. Decision making, problem solving, craft, and taste will always be paramount.