curriculum vitae
available — UK & Ireland
Dan Danowski
head of design · design systems
I build production design systems from scratch — token architecture, Figma libraries, documentation and design-to-code pipelines — then hand them off so teams ship against them without me.
Experience
Oct 2025 — Apr 2026
Contract · Remote
Contract · Remote
Senior Product Designer, Cycloid
- —Designed a machine-readable three-tier token architecture and a Figma → StyleDictionary → code pipeline, built with Claude, to keep design, code and docs in sync.
- —Designed nested teams & inherited permissions to unblock an EU contract that broke the flat model.
Figma VariablesStyleDictionaryVueHistoire
Mar 2022 — May 2025
Head of Design / DS Manager, Atolls
- —Scaled one token architecture from 20 to 60+ white-label brands; cut brand onboarding from ~2 weeks to ~2 days.
- —Led a team of five; introduced a default/override multi-brand model and a component-vs-pattern governance split.
FigmaTokensStudioStyleDictionaryReactStorybook
2015 — Feb 2022
Senior UX Engineer / DS Lead, AVEVA
- —Led a board-mandated system unifying 150+ products across five tech stacks — spec-first, on a governed Material foundation with an industrial extension layer.
- —Ran tiered adoption at programme level; made the case for a dedicated DS engineer and QA.
Material DesignDesign tokensAzure DevOpsSAFe
2000 — 2015
Web & product design roles
- —Fifteen years designing and building for the web before specialising in design systems.
Core skills
Design systems
Token architecture (3-tier, W3C DTCG), governance, contribution models, adoption tracking, multi-brand theming.
Design → code
Figma Variables, TokensStudio, StyleDictionary, CSS custom properties, custom Figma plugins, AI-assisted pipelines.
Front-end
HTML/CSS, React, Vue, Angular, Storybook / Histoire — I write the code, so spec and build don't drift.
Leadership & craft
Managed up to 5 designers, cross-team programme management, WCAG 2.1 accessibility, product design.
Also
2024 — present
Chairperson, Designer & Developer, Northwest Vipers AFC
- —Rebuilt a broken WordPress site as a static 11ty + Markdown platform volunteers maintain themselves; governance and budgets for a community club.
Designing for the web since 2000 · references on request
