Jina Anne

Jina Anne
Design Systems Advocate
Clarity

Event participation

Founder of Clarity

Biography

Jina (they/she) is a design systems advocate. They founded Clarity, a design systems community conference, and they manage the Design Systems Slack. Jina co-chairs the Design Tokens Community Group. And on the Sass core team, they lead the brand and website design and development. Jina is also recognized as a Google Developers Expert (in Web Technologies [UI and Tooling]).

Jina has been making websites as a hobby for about 30 years. They’ve worked professionally in the industry for 22 years (19 of those years working with design systems).

Earlier in their career, Jina led the CSS architecture and style guide for the Apple Online Store remodel in 2007, which included launching the first iPhone. As a frontend UX engineer, they led the online store’s CSS architecture and documentation towards web standards globally across all store instances for locales, education and business-to-business, and more. They also supported the marketing and communication teams to build out components for time-sensitive product launches. Then, as a visual interaction designer, Jina worked on overall UI chrome for the store, sign in/account creation flows, shopping cart and check out flows, as well as product configurations for purchasing Macs, iPhones, iPods, and more.

At Salesforce, Jina was the founding designer on the Salesforce Lightning Design System and helped create design tokens (which has become an industry standard methodology for scaling design decisions across multiple platforms and products). They also led the Salesforce UX community and evangelism efforts, by acting as Editor-in-Chief for the Salesforce UX blog, managing the social media channels, hosting and organizing sponsorships for meet-ups and conferences, and coordinating speakers.

Afterwards, Jina led design systems and operations for Amazon’s no-code app builder, Honeycode. They supported the team with visual systems direction, accessibility, frontend development best practices, managing and rolling out design tool access, setting up workshops, and more.

At Asana Jina managed the designers for the Asana Design System, and grew the team from 2 design systems designers to 5 designers across design systems, accessibility, visual design, and mobile foundations.

And most recently, at Google, Jina managed the design and developer advocates for Material Design.

Jina has also advised design system teams, products, and startups. At Opvitae, they are an advisory board member focused on UX and design. They advise Haiku, the company that created Diez, a design token framework tool. Jina also was a committee lead for AIGA San Francisco, where they helped with social and content promotion.

Throughout Jina’s career, they have worked at companies including GitHub, Engine Yard, Crush + Lovely, inferno, Oden, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, etc. And through consulting, coaching, and agency work, they've worked with Amazon, Delta, FedEx, IBM, International Paper, JustWorks, Mass.gov, Panasonic, Pfizer, Spotify, Upwork, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, and many more.

Jina co-authored the Design Systems Handbook (DesignBetter.Co by InVision), Fancy Form Design (SitePoint), and The Art & Science of CSS (SitePoint). They were a tech editor for [Sass for Web Designer][] (by Dan Cederholm, A Book Apart) and Sexy Web Design (by Elliot Jay Stocks, SitePoint). They have written articles for publications including A List Apart, 24 Ways, The Pastry Box, Sitepoint, net Magazine, and Treehouse.

Jina has keynoted Design Systems London, Design Systems Conference Helsinki, CSS Dev Conf, and ConvergeSE, was a featured speaker at No-Code Conf, AIGA Design Conf, Adobe MAX, and have also spoken at events such as An Event Apart, Beyond Tellerand, Smashing Conference, and many more.

Jina has been featured in net Magazine several times, and Print Magazine featured them as a leading San Francisco creative.

They have been said to be one of the most cheerful goths.