0:00:16 Matt: Welcome to Podcast awesome, where we chat about icons, design, tech, business, and, of course, nerdery with the members of the Font awesome team.

0:00:37 Matt: I'm your host, Matt Johnson, and, you know, I gotta say that since the launch of Font Awesome Six, the Font awesome site is looking pretty slick these days. And you have designer and front end developer Kelsey Jackson to thank for a good chunk of that work. In this Nerd Show and Tell Kelsey and I discuss how he got his start at Font Awesome, his recent work on the Font Awesome design system, as well as his interest in B-grade horror movies, cocktail mixology, and a whole lot more.

0:01:10 Matt: All right, so, Kelsey Jackson, thanks for hanging out on the Nerd Show and Tell. I've got to ask, you know, your moniker on the Slack Channel is Purple Tape. What's the story behind that name?0:01:23 Kelsey: So that is an homage to my favorite album of all time, which is Raekwon The Chef's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. It's a Wu Tang album.

0:01:34 Matt: Oh, nice.

0:01:35 Kelsey: Yeah, there's a lot that goes into it, but it was nicknamed the Purple Tape hip hop in it, so they'll know

0:01:42 Matt: Why was it issued on a Purple cassette originally?

0:01:46 Kelsey: It was.

0:01:47 Matt: Okay. Nice. What year did it come out?

0:01:50 Kelsey: I believe it was 1995.

0:01:52 Matt: That was, like, just before cassettes started to phase out a little bit, seems like. Yeah, I loved the packaging of 90s cassettes when they would do something a little bit different, even if it was, like, a different cassette color or whatever. I miss the physical aspect of going and buying music, like looking at the J card or looking at the CD insert.

0:02:18 Kelsey: Yeah, I miss that. There's a lot of cool artwork, a lot of cool photos that came with albums and CDs. That's kind of no longer the case, unfortunately.

0:02:27 Matt: I do like the resurgence in certain genres of vinyl, though, which sort of brings that whole feel back. I think there might be a backstory about when you met Dave Gandy and how you got acquainted with him and started working at Font Awesome. Do you have a story about that?

0:02:43 Kelsey: There's a local developer group around here in Northwest Arkansas, and we got a message that Font Awesome was relocating their headquarters at Benville, Arkansas, and he got in touch with them and they set up sort of like a show and tell to the community and learn more about him. And he gave a talk, and I was one of the few people who wasn't, I suppose starstruck just walked up and shook his hand.

0:03:07 Kelsey: And it's weird how Font Awesome was kind of a big deal. So it's weird how people were just afraid to walk up to the man and introduce themselves, and I was one of the few that did that, if I remember correctly. Yeah, and ever since then, it was just on and off me and him talking through Slack because I've been a Font Awesome customer for years. And I remember I was having an issue with one of my projects and I reached out to him.

0:03:32 Kelsey: He passed me along to Trevor, our customer service person. Ever since then, he's been cool just talking back and forth. And eventually I became a contractor, and that was sort of a test. Luckily, I was good enough and he brought me on. But I've been kind of working that angle up since I met the guy. I wanted to work at Font Awesome.

0:03:55 Matt: Oh, nice.

0:03:56 Kelsey: Yeah, it was kind of the long con, if that's appropriate. It all worked out, so it was cool.

0:04:04 Matt: Yeah. That's great. Where were you working at the time?

0:04:07 Kelsey: At the time, I believe I worked at Waco Media. It's one of those newspaper conglomerates that owns, like, 60 something newspapers in one area of the country. It was pretty much the same thing I do here. Developer or designer type. Deal.

0:04:23 Matt: With that in mind, tell us a little bit about your professional background and what your role is now at Font Awesome.

0:04:28 Kelsey: Okay, well, currently at Font Awesome, I am a product designer. How I became a designer in the first place was when I was in high school, I pretty good art student, and my art teacher at the time pulled me to the side and said, “hey, man, I know this is what you like and what you want to do. If you want to sort of stay connected to the art world and not be broke, you might want to look into design”, because at that point I'm from rural Arkansas.

0:04:53 Kelsey: I had never heard of design at that point. So I looked into it, thought it was something that I might be into. Got a scholarship to Arkansas State and went there for design and decided to start going from there.

0:05:07 Matt: What kind of art were you doing? Were you like, painting or drawing or sculpting?

0:05:11 Kelsey: It was mostly drawing. I didn't really get into other forms of media until I got to college.

0:05:15 Matt: What kind of stuff did you like? Drawing?

0:05:17 Kelsey: Man, I was really into robots and flowers. 

0:05:20 Matt: Sort of animated type style?

0:05:24 Kelsey: Yeah, I'm into cartoon. That's all I watch as a kid is cartoons. Like, hell, I'm asked to watch cartoons. Yeah, that's pretty much what it was.

0:05:33 Matt: Are you a comics fan too?

0:05:35 Kelsey: Yeah, I'm into comics. Didn't really get into it until sort of high school, but yeah, I've gotten pretty into them.

0:05:42 Matt: Somewhat of a selfish follow up question. I've got a couple kids at home that are quite artistic and are constantly drawing. They have their little notebooks. They're toting around with them drawn all the time, so I'm really trying to encourage that. But similarly, I'm sort of like, if they got into fine art, that'd be great, but the chance of them making a living at it in the future is kind of rough.

0:06:07 Matt: Where do you see the connection between your interest in drawing and how that connected to design?

0:06:14 Kelsey: It helped me build the foundation of which design is built on as far as creating hierarchy, point of focus, having a direction when you're about to do something, it helped me in that way. So once I got into designer, I already kind of had a way of going forward.

0:06:33 Matt: Did you feel like you learned what you needed for real world experience, or do you feel like you kind of figured that stuff out on the ground in your own projects?

0:06:44 Kelsey: Oh, man, I got out of school not knowing a damn thing about the world because I went to art school, right. I was in the art program, and it's a different world, man. I spent most of my time in the art studio doing ceramics, silk screening, illustration, what have you. And once I got out, it was kind of a hard lesson because I had to grow up real quick. It was fun, though.

0:07:09 Matt: Well, I think the college experience — it shows you that you can work through something hard and complete something over a couple of years. And this is a conversation I'm having with my kids now. I've got a first year high schooler and first year middle schooler, and it's like we start talking about that. The college experience for the workforce, I don't know how much it actually prepares you.

0:07:29 Matt: If you're a science or math nerd, it may slot you right into a career path, but beyond that, it's really just more of the socializing experience, the chance to work hard at something and show that you can complete something and be diligent.

0:07:46 Kelsey: Definitely. Because when I graduated high school, I didn't know a ton about the world where I came from, which is very country, Arkansas. So going to college really helped me out. Just getting new experiences, meeting new people, learning about things I never would have learned otherwise. 

0:08:15 Matt: There anything in the last couple of splits that is worth highlighting? Can you walk us through that a little bit?

0:08:20 Kelsey: This last split for the one we're on now, I got to work on our internal design system, which is something we've been batting around for a while, and we finally just said, screw it, and we focused on it and it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work getting it up to date, trying to establish standards and principles and how we're going to proceed with it going forward. It is a lot of fun, though.

0:08:49 Matt: That's a little bit of a foreign world to me. But for somebody who is not really clued into what those terms might mean, how would you explain a design system to somebody and what it's for?

0:09:00 Kelsey: A design system is a collection of patterns that one can use to build applications, different aspects of design. If you're a company and you repeatedly have to do a thing when you have a design system, it makes it a whole lot easier so you're not reinventing the wheel every time.

0:09:22 Matt: Yeah. So I think I've heard somebody explain it in a way like if you had say, a housing, a residential housing development and a lot of the houses are sort of the same. You may have custom elements to the houses, but there's a similarity to each. And the architects will have basically a plan that they can work on. But you may have certain aspects to individual houses that are more custom built, but basically of the architecture is essentially the same. Does that kind of capture the idea of a design system?

0:09:56 Kelsey: Yeah, basically it's a set of standards to help manage design at scale. It reduces redundancy and it helps create like a shared language to keep things a shared visual language sorry. Keep things consistent across all different types of channels.

0:10:13 Matt: Okay. And so a follow up to that, that I'm curious about is Corey Laviska came on board recently and Shoelace, his company, Shoelace, joined forces with Font Awesome. Which is really exciting. And it's an open source library of web components. What would the difference be between web components and a design system?

0:10:37 Kelsey: I wouldn't say there was a difference. I think they kind of work along with it. Like you could use Shoelace to help build a design system. It's a way of creating reusable custom elements. So for instance, if you had a website or an application that needed to use database like a graph or something, and it's very complicated and you don't want to have to build that over and over again. So you can create that and it could be reused wherever you want.

0:11:08 Matt: So in the last chunk of work that you did, were there particular challenges that you bumped up against and anything new that you learned or challenges that you faced?

0:11:17 Kelsey: Yeah, there were a lot of challenges. As far as the, I guess you could call it technical debt. We already had a lot of components and elements already built and they kind of needed to be refined and standardized. So we may have had six different types of buttons, a few different types of filters, and that, that needed to be, you know, pared down and sort of whittled away. That's a common thing with design systems because there's always a balance between, you know, wanting to be able to explore new things, seeing what new things to add while still trying to stay consistent with your shared visual language.

0:11:57 Matt: Yeah. And I would think too, when you're really going for consistency, you might do a chunk of work and then when you're coming towards the close of your work, you're going to continue to whittle down from there. You're going to say, here are all the things that are working for the system and here's something that we're not going to use, we're not going to include it.

0:12:16 Kelsey: And that's one of the things about a design system. It's never really finished. It's kind of a living thing and as you go forward and you're testing out new things or you discover new things, you update and keep it going.

0:12:30 Matt: There's got to be a way to catalog and have standards for a design system so that a team is all on the same page and they know what to refer to. And have you ever been involved in that side of the work at all?

0:12:42 Kelsey: Different companies do it different ways, but there's always sort of, like you said, a compliance board or approval board that sort of makes sure that whatever you put out, it's consistent with what the brand or company is trying to do.

0:12:56 Matt: Yeah, because it would seem like if you have a template that you're working with, if there weren't any controls on it, really, people may not use it properly and then you've sort of shot yourself in the foot, then you're not actually being consistent with your design.

0:13:11 Kelsey: This one project I had back when I worked at an agency, and it was a package of diapers that I had to design. One side had Spiderman and the other side, I believe, had Tinkerbell.

0:13:27 Matt: On the same diaper.

0:13:28 Kelsey: Yeah, it's crazy how it happened. So I did a design of it and sent it off to them for approval and they came up with these changes that we can't have Spiderman looking at Tinkerbell because they're part of different universes. And that's one of the things you find out as far as, like, compliance.

0:13:52 Matt: Right.

0:13:53 Kelsey: Sometimes they have very specific rules.

0:13:55 Matt: They probably weren't having conversations between departments making sure that they're being consistent. So are there any tech developments that you pay attention to these days? Just like, as a hobby, the things that you keep an eye on?

0:14:16 Kelsey: Yeah, I try to stay up to date on web components. That seems to be like a pretty big thing in web. And I try to keep up with machine learning AI. I always keep it at arm's length because you remember a few years ago when Crypto NFT Space got real hot.

0:14:40 Matt: Oh, yeah.

0:14:41 Kelsey: My spidey sense is going off about this when it comes to AI. I feel the grift coming on with some companies.

0:14:51 Matt: Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot more headlines when it comes to AI and I'm not sure what to make sense of it. Some people get really alarmist about it, which I think there's probably good reason for that, but I wonder how it's going to shake out. I will say, as a content creator, I'm spending a good bit of my time with words and stuff and I see these content generator things and I'm flipping off my computer all the time because I'm like, Come on, man, don't be putting me out of a job here!

0:15:26 Matt: I'm not sure how to make sense of it.

0:15:28 Kelsey: Yeah, I think we're a long ways away from them to actually not need humans in that space.

0:15:34 Matt: It could be a springboard to maybe get you going on content, but it can't really do what a human can do yet. I don't know, man. You always wonder, these Sci-Fi folks that come up with these Dystopian future. So what icon should make it into the Font Awesome. Canon that is not currently in the canon.

0:16:01 Kelsey: Well, okay, so here's the thing. I've thought about this quite a bit. I'm a fan of horror movies or the horror genre, and I would love to see us fall. Awesome. We do a whole series of horror themed icons. I mean, Jason, Freddie, Leatherface, Carrie. I'm sure I would use that maybe like a bucket of pigs blood or something. But yeah, no, I would love for us to have a whole bunch of horror themed icons that are easily recognizable.

0:16:33 Matt: Yeah. What are some of your favorite horror movies?

0:16:36 Kelsey: Oh, man. So I love the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That's easily one of my favorites. This little out of left field going to get out sort of a recent one. That is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen in my life. And let's see, what's another good one? There's a sort of B movie one called Night of the Creeps. It's about like Slugs from Outer Space, which is pretty good. It's similar to Slither, but a little older.

0:17:08 Kelsey: Oh, crap. I just remember Attack of the Killer Clowns from Outer Space. That's one of my favorite ones. 

0:17:32 Matt: So what is it about the horror genre that is interesting to you? Some people are kind of squeamish about that stuff, but some people, that's their thing.

0:17:43 Kelsey: Yeah, no, that part doesn't bother me that much. I believe it's sometimes how it confounds me because I have a hard time when I watch movies sometimes separating it from reality. Of the recent one movie called Hereditary, and it's a great movie, but the funny thing about it was there's a certain point in the movie where one of the characters has an allergic reaction. If they just had like an EpiPen at one point in the movie, none of the scary stuff would have happened. He didn't even solve I think about it every now and then.

0:18:20 Kelsey: Why did you just have an Epipen? There'd be no satanic cult uprising if you just had that one thing you backed on.

0:18:29 Matt: Yeah, I know that there's probably like sociologists and stuff that kind of go through the reasoning of why people are sort of drawn to the horror genre, but I read over this book review, there's one guy and this is more related to classic horror. Is it like the universal movies that are like black and white, like the Frankenstein's and Dracula and stuff like that? I was doing a commentary when the Twilight movies were kind of popular, and I was like, this doesn't fit at all, man. This isn't real vampires.

0:19:12 Kelsey: Yeah, I never got into the whole Twilight movie thing. They're like vampires and werewolves and they're all like, hot dudes, right? Is that part of it?

0:19:22 Matt: Yeah, they like, sparkled in the sunlight.

0:19:26 Kelsey: Yeah.

0:19:28 Matt: It makes me think about the way that people used to think about horror in the past and how they kind of used it as a way to do commentary on culture and stuff like that. So I'm always really interested in how filmmakers will use a genre to make culture commentary and stuff like that. It's like the who's the guy that did the original black and white Night of the Living Dead?

0:19:56 Kelsey: George Romero.

0:19:57 Matt: Yeah. That was in the late sixty s. And he was talking about race relation type stuff, and if somebody didn't really understand the backdrop of what he was trying to say, it might kind of go over their head. But I watched that a couple of months ago and I was like, Dang, man, that's a pretty good commentary.

0:20:16 Kelsey: Yes, I guess now that you remind me of that, that is one of my favorite films since the original Living Dead. It's a staple, and I believe it's like, in the public domain.

0:20:31 Matt: But yeah, it was around Halloween time. I just went along like a horror horror binge and watched all the corny 80s horror movies that I'd only seen portions of when I was a kid. So I went and watched like, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween and all.

0:20:49 Kelsey: Those Nightmare on Elm Street. That one breaks my heart because Freddie used to be he used to be a cool mass murderer. Well, I shouldn't say it like that. He was a character that you didn't mind until they I believe in one of the sequels. They like, reckoned him and he became like a child predator. So after that, it was kind of like, yeah, I don't want to be this guy for Highland anymore.

0:21:14 Matt: Just keep it simple, man. Just like kill people. Don't get all extra creepy with it.

0:21:20 Kelsey: Yeah, obviously nobody wants this guy to win.

0:21:24 Matt: Yeah, exactly. So what is the weirdest or crappiest job you've ever had?

0:21:35 Kelsey: I believe it was when I was a freshman in college. I was back home for the summer and I got a job working at this detail car wash. And I believe we made if I remember correctly, we were making like $10 for every car. Every car we detailed and respect to anybody that does that work. Because when they say detail they mean everything. I mean, we were getting into cup holders underneath the floorboards, everything.

0:22:07 Kelsey: They were spotless. But it wasn't work that I enjoyed.

0:22:12 Matt: Yeah. I mean, to do something so detailed, that's got to at least take, I would think at least an hour. And that's like, if you're working fast. Right?

0:22:21 Kelsey: Yeah. And you got to remember, I'm from rural Arkansas, so people came in with trucks caked in mud. Yeah, it was rough.

0:22:33 Matt: Good times. Well, now you know how to detail your own car effectively.

0:22:37 Kelsey: Yeah. No, I've never washed my own car again. That taught me I never want to do it. I will gladly pay someone. Pay them handsome, give them a good.

0:22:46 Matt: Tip, because you know what it's like. Yeah, totally. You said you had a really weird job once. Oh, you were an art director for a disaster grant services shop. What's that all about?

0:22:59 Kelsey: Right. Yeah. It was this place called Er Assist, and they helped places hit with natural disasters manage the grant, one they get from FEMA, the government, that kind of thing. And can't remember how long, what was, but a pretty big tornado hit central Arkansas. And part of our job was to go down there, help assess the damage and get to know the people, to help out where we could. And we were able to hold up in this house that someone wanted to stay in, and we were there for like, a week and a half. We really got to know the people who were affected by the disaster. We got to look through the area.

0:23:43 Kelsey: It was very heartening at the same time, disheartening, because I was happy to meet the people. I was happy to help out. It was great to be a part of the community. It was great to see people step up and help out their neighbor. But it was also sad to see the struggle that it would put on people.

0:24:00 Matt: Oh, yeah.

0:24:01 Kelsey: It was a weird job because those were two competing things you had to keep in your head.

0:24:07 Matt: Yeah, definitely. Well, that's so strange that you're the art director, but you're kind of boots on the ground, too, which I guess that's probably a good thing because then you understand the mission of the company.

0:24:19 Kelsey: It was a small shop, so it was kind of like.

0:24:30 Matt: So what do you nerd out about after work these days? What kind of things are you into?

0:24:40 Kelsey: It's funny, I nerd out about two things right now in particular, and that's cooking and cocktails. Like mixed drinks type deal. Okay. Yeah. Me and, like, a buddy of mine, we've gotten into tiki drinks, which are rum heavy. So every now and then a bunch of us get together, did it for New Year's, got together and just made a bunch of different tiki drinks.

0:25:06 Matt: Nice. Do you have any favorites?

0:25:09 Kelsey: Yes, my favorite drink. And I don't want to get into the whole tiki wars, but it's a navy grog. It got, like, three different types of room in it, and it hits pretty hard.

0:25:28 Matt: Yeah. Is it like juice? Got a juice base to it?

0:25:33 Kelsey: Yes, grapefruit juice. The ingredients are, I think I know off the top of my head, a Puerto Rican rum, a Jamaican rum, a Dimara rum, grapefruit juice, honey syrup, and I think that's it.

0:25:48 Matt: Yeah, that sounds pretty good. So you said not to get into the Tiki war, so I'll have to ask you, what are the tiki wars?

0:25:58 Kelsey: Some people are very strict about what counts as a tiki drink. Some people have a literal copyright on a certain type of drink, and you have to use that type of rum in that drink or you might get sued.

0:26:17 Matt: Yeah, you got it. Yeah. So they name a drink and a recipe, and it's got to be just so.

0:26:23 Kelsey: Yeah.

0:26:25 Matt: What is it about the different rums? I know that there's, like, dark rum and light rum or whatever. Why would you put three different kinds of rums in a drink?

0:26:35 Kelsey: Well, we're talking about alcohol. I think rum is one of the more like I don't know if the burst is the right word, but there's a lot of different types of rum and different parts of the world make different types of rum. So you could be in Cuba and have a certain type of rum, and it's completely different than a type of rum from, like, Guyana or Jamaica, right? Yeah. It's got a very rich history.

0:27:05 Matt: Really? Dark rum has definitely got a different taste to it than light, generic light Captain Morgan or something like that.

0:27:13 Kelsey: Got a different you can go down a rabbit hole really quick. Was it last couple of months, I probably spent a couple of $100 on just trying out different types of Role.

0:27:25 Matt: Yeah. So would you say I guess I.

0:27:28 Kelsey: Should take this time out to say, everyone, please drink responsibly that's I had mashed over a certain amount of time. I didn't go out and get, like, $600 of rum a night.

0:27:40 Matt: Right. Yeah. Drink responsibly, tip your bartender, all that stuff. But drink responsibly don't drink and drive people.

0:27:49 Kelsey: Absolutely not.

0:27:50 Matt: So with the experimentation that you've done there, do you feel convinced that getting top shelf stuff makes a difference as.

0:27:57 Kelsey: Far as rum goes? No.

0:28:01 Matt: Okay.

0:28:01 Kelsey: If you're mixing it and you know what you're doing, I think you can get away with some of the less pricey stuff.

0:28:07 Matt: So, speaking of the spirits, we often have a celebratory bottle at our Biannual Snuggles. We usually have, like, a bourbon. Has there been a favorite that we've tried out? One of the snuggles.

0:28:22 Kelsey: Yeah, I really did like the Pappy one because it's super rare and I think it's worth the price tag that you can put on it.

0:28:34 Matt: Yeah, that was very tasty. I enjoyed it, too. It's funny, the Snuggle after that, Dave had got and Dave really kind of goes to great lengths to find stuff that's rare. And I love that how he's always like, looking for something that's like super top shelf where we can have an experience together. What was that big old bottle that he got that had old Fitzgerald?

0:28:57 Kelsey: Yeah, that's the one that came with it had like an apparatus.

0:29:00 Matt: It came with yeah, where you pour it and it was like I don't know. Was it a couple of gallons? It was like a pretty big bottle.

0:29:08 Kelsey: Yeah, it was giant. We still had it in the office. We never actually finished it. Yeah, that was an experience, to be sure.

0:29:15 Matt: The seller was a little bit peeved at Dave because we were going to drink it. It's like, well, yeah, I mean, it's a collectible bottle, but you don't drink it. You just put it on a shelf.

0:29:29 Kelsey: Okay. Yeah, I disagree with that with that person. Another thing that I'm into is I'm into sneakers, and I have close to three dozen pairs. I've never been one of those. To buy a pair and never wear them, like, what's the point?

0:29:47 Matt: Right? Yeah, totally. Just put it on the shelf. Yeah. Then it's just like a status thing. It's like if you don't get something, do you enjoy it? It is pointless.

0:29:57 Kelsey: Yeah. I'm not trying to impress you. I do it. Do it for me.

0:30:09 Matt: So you delved into the tiki drinks. You also have been doing some cooking at home, isn't that right? Yeah. You got any favorite recipes these days?

0:30:17 Kelsey: Not necessarily recipes, but I'm pretty big steak person. I think I've pretty much gone through all the different cuts on a cow. Steak is probably my favorite thing to do.

0:30:30 Matt: Oh, yeah. What's your favorite cut?

0:30:31 Kelsey: I have to say it's a toss up between a pecania and a ribeye.

0:30:37 Matt: Pecania. What's up?

0:30:38 Kelsey: And a bay for it is the Soyloin cap. It's a pretty popular cut in Brazil. I was lucky enough, my butcher, he was able to get some in, so I started buying him by like, the pound, several pounds at a time. And this is cool, man. Like, there's a pretty big fat cap on it. Take it home, slice it up, salt it, throw it on a grill. It's fantastic.

0:31:00 Matt: What's the characteristics as opposed to a.

0:31:03 Kelsey: Ribeye, there's I guess more of a beefy flavor. Certain ribeyes. There's like a lot of fat sort of in between the meat. That can kind of throw you off, depending on how you cook it. At least with the pecania, you can take it off if you want. Now you shouldn't because the fat is the best part, but you have that option.

0:31:25 Matt: Oh, yeah. You don't want to have too lean of a cut, man. You got to have some of that fatty goodness in there. It adds all the flavor.

0:31:31 Kelsey: Absolutely.

0:31:32 Matt: So where are some of the places that you go online for inspiration for cooking?

0:31:36 Kelsey: Yeah, probably my favorite is. Josh Weizen fella, and he's a pretty funny guy. And the stuff that I get from him replicated recipes, they all come out pretty good.

0:31:48 Matt: Did you watch that show on Hulu called The Bear?

0:31:52 Kelsey: No, I didn't. I've heard about it. I've seen the little commercials, but I never actually got the chance to watch it.

0:31:58 Matt: Yeah, it's a good series, man. I really enjoyed it without giving it away. Like, this young guy basically inherits an Italian beef sandwich shop where all the locals are all about this shop. And he inherits this shop. And in a past life, he had been, I think, like a sous chef at, like, a super top tier foodie restaurant that was like super high stress. He starts working at the sandwich shop, but they're very particular about their sandwiches.

0:32:29 Matt: And it's all about the drama in the kitchen and restaurant life. And he's super stressed out. And there's a lot of yelling because it's in Chicago. They're Chicagoans that get in each other's faces a lot. So you watch an episode and you're like, oh, gosh, I need to get a background because I'm feeling so tense from all this yelling.

0:32:54 Kelsey: Why didn't Wrigley deliver? Because we're out of money. The only beef I could get was bone in, which you have to braze. All right, it takes 2 hours longer.

0:33:02 Matt: The good news is but anyway, all that to say, there's a guy in that series. He's sort of like a helper that does food deliveries. And he's kind of like a jack of all trades. Like he's helping the family with food delivery and stuff, but he works on the plumbing. And anyway, he's actually like this foodie guy in real life. And oh, Maddie Matheson. Let's see here.

0:33:29 Kelsey: Oh, yeah, he's a big, like, tattooed fella. Yeah, I know who he is.

0:33:36 Matt: Anyway, this guy, he plays a character in The Bear. Similar kind of character, how he comes across on his YouTube videos. This guy Maddie Matheson, but he's like this kind of aging, like, punk, hardcore guys all tattooed up and stuff. He's just like super irreverent. And you wonder, is this guy on Shrooms or something? It's kind of more like comedy than anything else. But he just does comfort food and just like really kind of greasy stuff.

0:34:10 Matt: And he'll do like he does a whole series on burgers where he uses wagyu beef on one. And he's like, look, this is like a $1,000 burger. I'm just going to use this nasty ground beef from the grocery store, and we'll see which one's better. And he just goes through this whole thing. It's pretty funny.

0:34:29 Kelsey: The grind down back. Two small pat come together. I just dumped a diverter straight to the face. I'm going to be selling Maddie's patty sauce soon. You could buy that down in the comment section. Tell you one thing. Good thing we all had a laugh attack.

0:34:51 Matt: All right, so basically, if you're looking for some junk foodie comedy. You're going to want to go check that out. So Kelsey, we've covered a lot of territory today and we talked a little bit about your background and how you joined Font awesome and met Dave Gandy. And we've talked a little bit about your horror movie and mixology obsessions. So I want to go back to something that you said earlier about design systems.

0:35:18 Matt: I guess a couple of questions there. First, when did you start learning about design systems and start putting them in place? And then secondly, can you think of any resources or people folks should be paying attention to who maybe want to learn more?

0:35:36 Kelsey: Sure. So what got me into design systems was at a previous place I worked at, I was asked to sort of cobble together a style guide because a lot of the people who were touching the pages, web pages others are working on, they weren't designers or devs. So they needed guidance on how to do it and keep some consistency, which is one of the pros of using a design system. It helps you keep consistency and it helps lower the barrier of entry for design.

0:36:12 Matt: Well, that seems weird though, because you were working for a big newspaper company, right? So you'd think they'd be really big on consistency.

0:36:22 Kelsey: Yeah, it's newspapers and a lot of people were sort of traditional in the way they looked at things and none of them were really used to the web. They were kind of just saying, I'll throw it on then if it works, it works. Which at a certain point that's fine. But doing it across several different channels, different apps, it's got to be important to keep that consistency.

0:36:47 Matt: So as you started getting into that and learning it, how did you kind of break into it? Who were you paying attention to that helped you learn?

0:36:55 Kelsey: I was asked to do this and it was sort of new to me at the time. So I just jumped in, started googling things about design systems and I landed on this fellow named Brad Frost and he came up with this methodology of atomic design and it's a way of designing across several different spaces. It's way of just designing a collection of web pages you're trying to develop for web, for mobile, and you want to be able to keep a level of consistency.

0:37:27 Kelsey: And he helped me sort of figure that out as I was going through a lot of his stuff.

0:37:32 Matt: Didn't you pick up some learning from the Nielsen Norman Group as well?

0:37:36 Kelsey: That was another one, yeah. Through my research I also came across the Nielsen Norman Group. They're sort of a collection of UX design principles and articles. It's a pretty cool foundation if anyone wants to look them up. And it's not just for design system, it's for pretty much all forms of digital UX design.

0:37:57 Matt: Well, we will add those resources to the show notes. So for anybody wanting to check that out. Check the show notes for additional learning. And Kelsey, thanks for coming on the Nerd Show and Tell thank you. All right, so that is a wrap for the latest installment of The Nerd Show and Tell. A special thanks to Kelsey for coming on the show. If you like what you've heard, you know what to do. Please subscribe.

0:38:26 Matt: Pass this on to your friends, give us a like and review, if you wouldn't mind. And this podcast was produced and edited by yours truly. That's me, Matt Johnson. The Font awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin, and audio mastering is handled by Chris Enns at Lemon Productions.