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Alex Palacios
Product Design & Creative Direction for Fortune 500 Companies
Alex Palacios is the Director of Product Design at Pantheon Platform, a leading website management platform based in San Francisco, United States.13 With over 10 years of experience in the digital realm, Palacios is an award-winning creative professional with a passion for design, technology, and branding.45
In his role at Pantheon, Palacios is involved in the company's brand refresh and new product developments. He was present at DrupalCon Portland in 2022, where Pantheon unveiled a brand refresh and a new Decoupled solution.2 Palacios' expertise likely contributes to Pantheon's user-friendly interface and powerful features that help website owners create, manage, and grow their online presence.
Prior to his current position, Palacios has worked with a wide range of clients on various types of projects, showcasing his versatility in the field of digital design.4 His LinkedIn profile (username: alexetism) highlights his experience at Pantheon Platform and mentions his education from Agile Learning Labs.5
Highlights
Figma Config 2024 was a whirlwind of learning, networking, and dealing with unexpected challenges. I was lucky to attend with my team. Here’s a recap of my experiences and highlights from the event.
If you don't enjoy reading blogs, here's the TL;DR:
The Return of Maximalism: Now the MAMAA’s are renouncing sameness, and we are going to see the repercussion of this shift downstream. It has been 10+ years of tech minimalism, specially accentuated by Material Design principles. This week Google and others openly revealed their shift discussing their updated Material Design mantras that focus more on craft and flexibility: “Form follows feelings.”
Planning Around Ambiguity: Emphasized the importance of building processes that enable teams to navigate uncertainty.
Relying on Intuition: Shifting away from data-backed decisions is speeding up innovation among some of the big tech players. The destigmatization of intuition is creating (again) a protected space for tastemakers to create better experiences with less of a burden to prove their “how” is right.
Collaboration with Engineering: Highlighted the need for leaders to foster strong cross-functional relationships. There’s a return of the UX Engineer, and I’m here for it! Ethan Eismann from Slack spoke about their ambassador program that allows any engineer to join the Design org for 3 to 6 months. During this time, engineers learn design methodologies. After their rotation, they return to their original teams, sharing their new insights and spreading the craftsmanship “vibe” across the company.
Measuring Team Health: Discussed the pitfalls of relying solely on metrics like velocity, advocating for a focus on team “vibe” and consistency. Even though I laughed several times as I heard from reputable organizations (such as Github, Figma, Google, Slack, and LaunchDarkly) talking about making room to seeing the right vibes as a way to measure success, I understand the sentiment behind this. Many KPIs foster the wrong behavior with people. For example: you don’t want to reward someone just because they did more commits or because they solved more JIRA or customer support tickets.
Craft is back: Slack leadership emphasized the importance of craft in software design, advocating for minimal lovable products (MLPs) over minimal viable products (MVPs). They shared the venn diagram of the qualities of software: utility, usability, and craft. If you only have utility and usability, your product’s feeling is simply mundane. A combination of utility, usability, and craft is the only way to make your product great.
Dale Sande: Discussed the benefits of using web components for maintaining design systems, especially in small teams. Web components are particularly beneficial if someone is making a design system for multiple codebases. His design system for Alaska Airlines is making its way outside of the web and appearing in airport screens.
What did you enjoy about this year's Config?
HIRING ALERT! Front-end developer. Contractor. Working w/ our progressive design system. Remote. Global OK. Join our incredible UX team @ Pantheon Platform
Job details 👇 👇 👇 👇 👇
Looking for a Front-end Engineer to assist with multiple technical implementations of the Pantheon Design System. Tasks could include: Writing reusable UI components in accordance with prescribed technical guidelines, writing automated tests using Playwright, and performing system-wide updates to a Gatsby-based documentation site.
Interested parties should have extensive experience with React, up-to-date knowledge of the Gatsby framework, write code that meets WCAG 2.1 compliance, and be a CSS expert. Bonus points for experience with GraphQL and Drupal 9/10 theming
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DM me!
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Cc: Shane Duff Mike Glezos Melissa A. Miller Michael Becker
