Design Portfolio

Hi, I’m Luke

I’m a designer in the Kansas City area with over 10 years of design experience. I’ve spent the last 3 years working with Snapchat specializing in design systems.

I’m passionate about high quality, systems driven design with an emphasis on leveraging the power of good foundational primitives.

This page gives the highlights of my recent work. A detailed, in-depth portfolio is linked below, please send me an email for the password, luke.i.mccready@gmail.com. Thanks!

 
 

Portfolio Highlights

Snapchat Design System

I developed a new Foundation library that served not only Snapchat’s design system, but also other teams across the company. This included a new base color palette and semantic palettes, image resources, and more.

I updated and expanded Snapchat’s design system library to include the latest figma features, an improved semantic color palette, tokenized spacing and type, and a broader collection of components.

App Theming

Leveraging the power of the new semantic color palette, we were able to quickly develop app themes to serve Snapchat+ users. I devised a small collection of theming tokens that could allow for rapid exploration of themes in Figma and empower designers to iterate quickly. We launched this feature with 8 themes and a path to easily add more over time to align with holidays and promotions.

Snap Enterprise Design System

I had the opportunity to work on Snapchat’s enterprise design system that serves web products like Ads Manager. I took over this library and completed a code-aligned component build that proved very helpful for the enterprise design team.

I was also able to help guide the improvements made to the enterprise design system that built upon shared primitives with the product design system, facilitating greater quality and brand alignment.

Snapchat UI-UX improvements

I collaborated on efforts to explore foundational design improvements to the Snapchat app that greatly simplified the color, type, and visual style of the app.

I made my exploration work within the context of an experimental Figma library. This way, changes to type, spacing, or color could happen at the component level and propagate across many different screens. This was really helpful to stress test the impact of a change across edge cases.

Quality Documentation

I created and maintained the documentation for the Snapchat design system in Coda.

We wanted this to be a resource for designers to know how to use primitives and components, as well as a resource for engineers to see code snippets, as well as detailed specs on component structure and functionality.

Production Design

My first year with Snap I worked in production design. Here I created dozens of highly detailed feature spec to create a smooth design to dev handoff. I identified accessibility issues, implemented design system standards, and explored the ramifications of device size, platform, and localization.