Patrick Mullin

I build design systems, and the teams that run them.

Twenty-six years in, the work I care about has not changed. Make the thing underneath good, so everyone building on top of it can move faster and stop thinking about it.

Work

  • Harbor 2.0

    The Trade Desk

    The system's migration to a new visual language, in two months, with zero consumer-facing breaking changes.

  • AI Prototyping Tool

    The Trade Desk

    An internal tool that generates high-fidelity React prototypes from the design system, so generated work inherits the system instead of drifting from it.

  • Density and Accessibility

    Google

    Enterprise ads products needed dense UIs. Google's accessibility requirements needed bigger targets. Sacrificing either one cost real money, so teams were stuck.

All nine projects

Career

At The Trade Desk I founded Harbor, their first design system, and led its migration to a new visual language. Before that, fifteen years at Google, where I built the first cross-product design system for Ads and managed the team behind it, up to eleven designers and researchers across the U.S., U.K., and China.

  • The Trade Desk

    Founded Harbor, TTD's first design system, and rebuilt its foundations for Zuma.

  • Google

    Fifteen years as a manager and individual contributor focused on enterprise design.

  • DoubleClick

    Front-end web development and design focused on new feature design and development.

  • Performics

    Front-end web development and technical support.

Peers

  • “He was my manager at Google, and more recently a peer at The Trade Desk, where my team partnered closely with his as we went through a foundational design system shift. During a major foundational migration, he was hands-on with the feature teams building on top of the system, genuinely trying to understand our specific problems rather than handing down a spec and moving on. That kind of engagement is rare, especially at the pace this work demanded, and it's what got a hard, cross-team shift through without teams like mine feeling stranded.”

    Lauren Haas Principal UX Design Lead, The Trade Desk

  • “Pat is not only highly skilled from both a creative and technical standpoint, but also genuinely invested in his team and in creating a foundation that lasts. The design system he built from the ground up has become essential infrastructure across our entire product organization.”

    Amelia Ruslim Product Design, The Trade Desk

  • “Working with Patrick's team was the best experience I've had working with any design group at Google in my 11+ years doing front-end engineering at Google. If I became CEO of Google tomorrow, I'd put Patrick in charge of Material Design.”

    Jeremy Elbourn Tech Lead for Angular platform

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