marissaklymkiwContact

About

I take the things I love apart to see how they're built. It's been the same instinct since I was hand-coding fan sites.

I'm Marissa Klymkiw and I lead design systems in Los Angeles. That first fan site was for Sailor Moon, on GeoCities, around 1999: a navigation scheme, a color system, reusable pieces copied page to page. I didn't know those were design-system ideas. I just knew it had to be right.

Now it's the patterns ~20 product teams rely on. Adoption is earned, never issued. Accessibility, reusable components, and the structure that lets other teams build without re-solving the same problems. The scale changed. The wiring didn't.

Teams aren’t the end of that chain. A researcher who can’t get a microscope on the network, a parent locked out of a tuition bill, a manager counting her hiring pipeline by hand across six tools: none of them chose the software they were handed. Software people are required to use owes them more care than software they pick, not less. That is what the structure is for.

The same obsession points at other things. A book collection with a stricter taxonomy than most design systems I've audited. If you want the work version, the case studies are here.

How I work

  • I use AI every day, and I set the terms before it starts.

    This site was built with it. It carries the pace because the context, constraints, and standards are already in place. That part stays with me.

  • I build accessibility into the components before anyone ships on them.

    Around 20 teams inherit that work instead of solving it again at the end. Retrofitting is where it gets expensive and where it quietly gets skipped, so I don’t leave it there.

  • I name things by what they do.

    High-stakes products lose people the moment the interface hides how a decision was made. I write for what actually happens, and I cut anything that doesn’t help someone understand what’s in front of them.

  • The work I’m proudest of doesn’t have my name on it.

    I lead the systems roughly 20 teams build on without authority over any of them. One week that’s a token change, the next it’s auditing how components are actually being used in products. What lasts is the alignment that still holds after I’ve moved on.

Marissa Klymkiw, smiling, in a sunlit campus breezeway.
Based
Los Angeles area
Still obsessed with
The Beatles, books, my Hobonichi
Currently reading
The Disappearers by Marlon James

Where I've built design systems

  1. 2014–2019
    SoCalGas
    Rebuilt the customer website and set the standards the org built on.
  2. 2019–2022
    USC
    Built the design system behind the consumer-grade applications students and their families use.
  3. 2022–2024
    Indeed
    Set the data-visualization standards aligning UX across Indeed's enterprise hiring teams at marketplace scale.
  4. 2024–Current
    UCLA
    Scaling it enterprise-wide through a cross-org partnership, piloting AI-powered design to codify patterns campus teams will build on.

What I work on

  • Design systems
  • Governance and adoption
  • Accessibility
  • AI-native workflows
  • Platform design

Industries

  • Higher education
  • HR technology
  • Energy and utilities