About Me
Hello, I’m Ariel Salminen, a Design Systems Architect from Helsinki, Finland with 20 years of experience helping companies build tools for the web platform.
A Design Systems Architect is a systems thinker; designing for the whole rather than the individual parts. As an architect, I collaborate with design, product and engineering teams on the tactical and strategic direction of a design system and help my clients set up the right tooling, processes and teams — all the way down to designing and developing complete design system platforms for them.
If thinking about my life and career over a longer period of time, I grew up in a family where both parents were artists. My dad was a photographer and sculptor who created modern sculptures and conceptual art. My mother was a goldsmith who held exhibitions as well. I spent all my childhood in art galleries and observing them create, so you could at least partially blame this creative environment for the initial spark to become a designer.
The bit that you can blame for the developer in me, I guess, is the first computer we got. It was a Macintosh 128K with one-bit, black and white display. Back then, Macs came bundled with HyperCard that let you program things without having to write any code. I remember being genuinely curious about this, as it made it possible for someone like me to create functional programs with just a few clicks.
This was perhaps the reason I got eventually so obsessed about design(ing) systems and working towards programs that would do the design work for us. On top of everything else, I guess I was also a little eccentric at the time, as I used to ponder the small details until everyone else got fatigued and fled home. I suppose I still am. As long as I can remember, I’ve always been into visual things and finding beauty from the things that surround us.
Growing up, I started studying graphic design and learning about printing presses and how to operate them. The coarse nature of these presses got me eventually more and more intrigued about movable type and typography. At that point, there was no turning back anymore. I knew I wanted to do something that would somehow combine these things and let me create systems that would make people’s working lives easier.
From this early childhood, and perhaps being a young adult, and coming back to the present moment, I nowadays have an extensive experience working on the web platform both as a designer and a developer. I often like to describe, that my job, in a design systems team, is about bridging the gap between designers, developers and other disciplines in the company and that’s also where my greatest strengths lie.
As our design products are becoming more dynamic, it makes less and less sense to separate the design and the development disciplines anymore. Instead of working in silos, I believe in a more collaborative process where we sketch our ideas in code or work closely together with the developers to achieve that.
At the end of the day, design is not just what something looks or feels like. Design is how it works and sketching in code enables us to focus on that. Moving quicker to code helps us to put content over form, embrace the fluid nature of the web, and focus on systems of components instead of pages. Design systems create an amazing platform for this type of collaboration to flourish.
