Donnie D'Amato, BFA., MA.

I am a fully-qualified user experience professional leading responsibilities in both product and engineering organizations. I have gained positive influence collaborating within the design systems community through personal research and development supported by professional experience.

Contact

Skills & Tools

Experience

Design Systems House

Founder & Chief Architect

October 2022 — present

Parsons School of Design

Adjunct Professor, User-Centered Design

January 2020 — present

GoDaddy

Lead Engineer, UX Platform

August 2019 — present

Compass

Senior UX Engineer, Design Systems

April 2017 — August 2019

Itemize

Lead UI Designer and Developer, Products and Tools

May 2015 — April 2017

Recent Projects

Mise en Mode

A year long research and development journey revealing a method to take semantic responsibility away from design tokens. Attempting to demonstrate how we might execute design decisions not through complex token naming exercises, but by burdening rectangles with glorious purpose.

mode.place

Complementary Space

A provocative take on how we think of space in design. This thesis takes the concepts of Gestalt and pushes them further to identify the why. As digital product designers, why do we choose one amount of space over another? “Because it looks better” is a common response but why does it look better? Perhaps more accurately, why does it look more correct?

complementary.space

Gridless Design

The web is good at these things, just not in the ways that designers have been accustomed to working. We’ll take a look at how we got here and how we might change our perspective. Let’s think outside of the grid and allow other guidelines to provide a comprehensive layout.

gridless.design