2024 — That's a Wrap
After the year that 2023 was, 2024 felt like breathing out. A new role, proper design systems work, and the occasional crisis of confidence.
Another year, another exhausted reflection post typed at 11pm before the Christmas break. But it was a good one. Let’s dig in.
After everything 2023 threw at me — the redundancy, the job market grind, the mental health wobbles — I went into 2024 quietly desperate for it to be boring. Not uneventful. Just stable. The kind of year where you can actually do the work rather than just survive it.
It was mostly that. Which, given where I’d been twelve months earlier, felt enormous.
The new role
The biggest thing this year was moving from AND Digital to Royal London as Lead Front-end Design Engineer. AND Digital was a decent landing pad when I needed one, but Royal London is where I actually wanted to be — the kind of role that had been on my radar for a while. Design system architecture at scale, accessibility as a genuine quality baseline rather than a compliance checkbox, and problems that are actually interesting to solve.
The first six months were deliberately slow. Not slow as in unproductive — slow as in deliberate. Understanding how things actually work before trying to change them. Building trust before building things. Mapping the landscape — the existing token structure, the component library, the gap between what the design system claimed to be and what teams were actually using day to day. That gap, as ever, was instructive.
The second half of the year started to feel like it had some momentum to it. The token architecture work in particular — working through the naming conventions, the semantic layer, the Figma-to-code pipeline — is the kind of problem I’ll happily spend a lot of time on. It’s where design decisions become engineering decisions, and vice versa, and getting that boundary right matters enormously.
I won’t pretend it’s been without its moments of imposter syndrome. Joining a bigger organisation, in a more senior position, after a year that knocked my confidence around a fair bit — there were days where the gap between what I knew I could do and what I felt capable of doing was genuinely uncomfortable. I’m mentioning this not for sympathy, but because I think it’s more common than people admit, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
It settled. It usually does.
Community & speaking
I spoke at a couple of events this year. Still terrifying every time. Still absolutely worth it. If you’re sitting on something worth saying and talking yourself out of sharing it — don’t. The web could do with more people willing to think out loud.
What I’m taking into 2025
The Royal London work is the main thread. The foundations are in — now it’s about shipping, and about making sure the system actually gets used rather than just existing. Adoption is a harder problem than architecture, and I’m increasingly interested in it.
I want to write more. I keep saying this. I mean it with varying degrees of commitment depending on the week. But the writing I’ve managed this year — the handful of proper pieces that actually got published — reminded me why I do it. Writing is how I figure out what I actually think, and I’d like to do more of it.
Here’s to a 2025 with fewer divs and more <main> elements.