2024 Year in Review

(This is an excerpt of my full “2024 Year in Review.”)

It’s my second full year of what I’ve come to call a “professional walkabout.” I shut down my agency SuperFriendly in 2022 and have been exploring many different business ventures since.

What have I been doing all year? A combination of consulting & coaching, client work, and creating/sustaining/growing my own products and ventures.

I spent the last year acting as a senior director of design systems for 纽约时报 , leading the team and helping to strategize around how to increase the adoption and implementation of the Times Product Language (TPL) design system product and process across all of the product and feature teams.

Despite primarily moving away from this kind of work, I also art directed the website for the Harris/Walz presidency; designed the agency website for my friends at NSMBL ; did a tiny bit of greenfield thinking on a project with my friends at BlackBox Infinite ; designed and built a website for a financial services firm; and did some branding work for my brother’s financial strategy business.

Hours-wise, I worked 1,851 hours, about 36 hours/week. The distribution of my effort generally broke down like this:

• My own products: 60%
• Consulting & coaching: 18%
• Vacation: 13%
• Client work: 5%
• Sponsorships: 3%

(For a detailed description of the revenue breakdown, check out the 2024 info on my Salary & Income page.)

Design System University

In last year’s review, I promised that “lots of changes on the way for DSU in early 2024.” I wasn’t lying.

This time last year, we had 3 paid courses available: Make Design Systems People Want to Use for $499, How to Use a Design System in Figma for $29, and How to Use a Design System in Code for $29. We had around 300 students between those 3 courses. I was a bit discouraged about both the small number of students and revenue. I was even more discouraged that I didn’t really have much else available so that more people could learn about design systems, a skill that I think will become more and more important for digital professionals over the next few years.

Last year, I had also released a design systems course with Dribbble called “Scaling Design Systems.” It had great reception when it launched, but Dribbble changed their education model later in the year to move away from online education. Fortunately, they granted me back the distribution rights for my course, and I re-released it through Design System University as Design Systems 101. This was a much better and more modern course, so I made the other three free and priced this one at $101, figuring even a small amount of revenue from it was better than it sitting on a shelf doing nothing. Even moreso, I hoped that pricepoint would allow more people to learn about design systems, especially with purchasing power parity on top of that. I’m super proud that we now have more than 10,000 students that have taken at least one course and 100 people who have taken all four. I hope to grow both of those numbers in 2025.

I ran 2 more cohorts of our Design System in 90 Days program, one of my favorite things to teach as I get to spend 1–2 hours every week for 12 weeks talking with some really smart people about complex design system challenges they’re facing. Across the 2 cohorts in 2024 were amazing students from The 19th , Jahez Group , Twitch , 纽约时报 , Globant , The Philadelphia Inquirer , Brunstad Christian Church, the California State Goverment, SiriusXM , and more. We’re running our next one in February, and I can’t wait to meet the new batch of students.

I know we’ll have to expand our offerings in 2025 to keep pace with the demand of design system proficiency in the industry. I’ve been having a few conversations with other folks who have great ideas for courses they want to teach (both self-paced and live), and I love the idea that courses could be taught by someone other than me. We’ve also had a few inquiries for not just training but help designing and building the kinds of design systems we’re teaching, so we may pilot a few small service offerings in 2025. Lastly, there’s a product idea I’ve had in my head for a while that I think could really help design system teams with a major hurdle many of them have. Perhaps 2025 will be the year I get that product out the door.

Design That Scales

My design system book Design That Scales came out in November 2023, so 2024 was the first full year it was in circulation. I’m blown away by the reception!

It was Rosenfeld Media ’s best selling book of the year!

The book received a very positive Kirkus review with a verdict of “Get it,” one of the most prestigious review publications in the literary world. They called it:

A lively and paradigm-challenging evaluation of what makes good system designs work at any scale.

Swoon! Not only that, but the book received a Kirkus star, an especially coveted designation awarded to books of “exceptional merit.” Only about 10% of the 10,000+ books reviewed annually receive a star!

We’ve run 3 Design System University book clubs for the book in 2024, and I’ve heard of at least a dozen companies that have used the book in their internal book clubs. How cool is that?!

Also, the book was published in Japanese!

My website

Last year’s review post was the first time I explicit wrote down that “I’m a writer,” perhaps an obvious sentiment from someone who’s written 3 books and published hundreds of thousands of words on the internet over the last 19 years. I’ve fully embraced that identity this year, at the very least on my website, writing 53 articles, 26% more than last year’s 42 articles.

My top three most popular posts this year:

1. The File Folder Structure Every Designer Needs
2. Shoot Your Shot
3. A “Definition of Done” Template

Last year, I also committed to taking my site seriously as an important part of my business by refining my branding and positioning, tightening up the information architecture and content strategy, and hiring a team to take over the production of the site. I haven’t publicly made good on that commitment yet, but if all goes well, this will hopefully be the last post you read on the current version of the site. That’s right: the new site is almost here.

Hiring

For those following along, it’s probably no surprise to hear about my realization that I can’t grow successful businesses without help.

2024 was my first full year of working with my new executive assistant, Camz Uyamot. It’s been incredible to work with her. She powers a lot of the stuff across all of my businesses. If you’ve emailed me, received a Design System University certificate, interacted with a social media post, or gotten a Doordash gift card for a group lunch, you’ve experienced something that Camz had a hand in. She’s a big reason I worked 11% less in 2024 but our revenue jumped by 72%. Now that a lot of our systems are humming, I can’t wait to see what we do together in 2025.

I’m also deep into the process of looking for a designer who can ship to be a regular collaborator with Camz and me. I received 123 applications, interviewed 12—asking 6 questions in the interview—and narrowed it down to 3 people I did paid test projects with. Those test projects have either already ended or are ending now. I’ll share more about this process in 2025, as you’ll see some of the work they did for me start to roll out.

I’ve also changed my tune a bit on hiring, partially as a result of this process. I’ve never had a designer “on staff” with me before, and I believed that lack was a barrier to my business growing. While I do still believe that, I’ve also reminded myself to stick with stuff that has worked for me in the past, stuff that I’m good at. SuperFriendly’s business model was building teams of freelancers and contractors, something I learned to do and manage really well over 10 years. So, a team that includes a few regulars and a few guest contractors from time-to-time could be a good mix of old and new to take it to the next level.

This year, I hired 2 people from Fiverr to execute a few fast, commoditized services for me. I also commissioned a few people to do some higher-value custom work for me, like illustration and specific flavors of web development.

I’m eager to see how this model plays out in the future.

My own distribution

For the last few years, I’ve really been exploring the strength of my own audience and distribution. My hypotheses was that distribution my content directly would be better than partnering with other distributors, but I’ve had to qualify and specify what “better” means to me.

Over the last two decades of my career, I’ve been very fortunate to have conference organizers invite me to their stages; employers allow me to publishers allow me to make books with them; podcast interviewers have me as a guest on their shows; education platforms host my courses with them; and more. I’m very grateful for these opportunities.

I’ve also had conference organizers reject my applications or exploit my involvement; employers attempt to censor my extra-curricular activities; publishers take the lion’s share of the profit split without fulfilling their responsibilities; podcast interviewers not publish the episodes I gave up my time for; education platforms change their business models; and more. Those aren’t complaints. That’s business. I accept that. I’m not the kind of person who asks business owners to change what they’re doing; I think it’s their right to run their businesses how they want to. But I don’t have to like it, and I almost always have the ability to choose something different.

There are two sides of a content creator’s business: making a product and marketing/selling that product. The choice most new content creators face is that they have a product—a course, a book, a template, etc.—that is valuable but too small of an audience turn that potential value into a lucrative business. So they partner with a distributor: some person, company, or platform that has a larger audience. The premise is simple: for a fee—either a one-time fee or, more commonly, a rolling royalty—that distributor turns their audience’s attention to the creator’s product, either turning them into present customers for the creator or adding them to the creator’s audience to become customers sometime in the future. Often times, the distributor has no or little intellectual property of their own; their business is distributing the work of their partner creators. That essentially splits up the work: the creator makes the product, and the distributor markets and sells that product.

What I’ve learned over the past few years is that many distributors aren’t as good as marketing and selling as they claim to be, often times because they don’t have a large enough or activated enough audience of their own to market and sell to. They seem to operate under the pretense that, if the content is good, the audience will come. That often leaves the creator with the conundrum of having to market their own work, but only realizing that after they’ve contractually agreed to a royalty with their distributor.

The simple but difficult solution for the creator is to grow their own audience to sell to directly, rather than indirectly selling to someone else’s audience. It’s a tale as old as time: if and when you can, cut out the middleman. Digital production companies figured that out in the early 2000s and stopped working through ad agencies, instead finding ways to work directly with clients. It’s more work for you, but a lot of times it’s worth it. Although it’s hard to grow a truly engaged audience, it’s also never been an easier time in history to do so.

It took me way too long to realize that I have an audience of my own—and a large, engaged one at that.

That realization is certainly correlated to why I’ve reduced the amount of conference speaking I’m doing lately. Early in my career, speaking at conferences was a major milestone, a big aspiration for me. I got to the point where I was doing about 10–15 conferences each year. In 2024, I spoke at 4 conferences: UX Scotland , RenderATL (Render Atlanta) , Figma ’s Config, and Knapsack ’s NYC Leadership Summit. The opportunity cost to speak at an in-person conference is high. There’s time spent writing a talk—for me about 40–80 hours—2 days of travel; introvert energy spent in a room full of strangers, some of whom want to talk to me after I deliver a talk; days away from other work; and days away from home… all to give a talk to 50 to 1000 people. Compare that to a Zoom call I recently hosted online that was attended by 245 people and watched to date by 1,800 people or the online session I taught last year around design system planning that 600 people attended and 7,400 later watched and participating in an in-person conference becomes a tougher value proposition except for a select few.

Again, I’m grateful for the distributors I’ve partnered with in my early career. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them, and I hope I’ve delivered on my end of the bargain in those partnerships. For this stage of my career, though, I’m focused on different channels that help me connect more directly with my audience: social media.

2025 strategy and goals

I’ve spent the last year trying different ways to talk to my audience and fans directly to find out what I can do for them. What I’m learning is that people want access to my experience because I’ve done a lot of things people in my audience aspire to do—level up in their career, start a business, find a decent work/life balance—and work directly with me to help them find it.

My services and consulting experience and general content creation has largely been around design systems for the last few years, and I fully intend on continuing to share what I’ve learned there. But more people seem to want strategy and guidance around career growth, professional progression, higher income, and entreprenuerial encouragement… all things I have experience with and thoughts on. My recent experiment of answering some questions live that people are struggling with seemed to strike a chord with the attendees—and lit me up to boot. I love sharing my “secrets” so that others can use them too!

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people are interested in these topics, given the state of the design industry. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people just like us laid off with little to no recompense, reinforcing the idea that our livelihoods aren’t in our own hands as much as we thought. Fittingly, a lot of designers are realizing there are other options, and they have the ability to make them work.

As someone who’s been well down that path for the last decade, I’d love to tell people about what damsels and dragons they’ll encounter there. That could be as easy as answering simple questions that have complex answers, like “How much should I charge for my services?” I wrote a short book called Pricing Design in 2016 that I really didn’t do much else with. My publisher A Book Apart has recently closed its doors, so the book is no longer available. However, I’ll be re-releasing it soon—for free!—so that more people can learn a crucial skill that’s still very daunting for many.

But books only go so far.

In early 2025, I’ll also be start a group coaching program for freelancers, small studios, and agency owners that want to take their service businesses to the next level of income and reputation. I’m still working on the core of the program, so I don’t have a lot of details to share about it yet, but the general shape of it will be a combination of instruction, discussion, practice, and review so I can get specific, tactical, and actionable with everyone in the program. It won’t be cheap, but I’m designing it in a way that I can all but guarantee that anyone who makes the financial investment on this program will make significantly more money than they spent.

If you’re interested in a program like that and can commit to spending a decent chunk of money (probably a few thousand dollars) and time (probably 3-6 months) investing in your business, reply in the comments and I’ll add you to my list of people to send details to once I have them to share. I’m committing to spending a good chunk of my 2025 helping designers level up financially and professionally.

My 2025 goal is to help the students in this program collectively make $10 million. From that, my goal for my own business is to break $1 million.

???? Read my full 2024 Year in Review post ????

—Dan

P.S. - See you in 2025!