Dan Mizzi-Harris

• Spearheaded recurring company-wide sentiment research on the effectiveness of the design system for designers and engineers. A subsequent study identified a 22% drop in contribution ease and 15% increase in outside-system usage; findings that directly led to the team doubling in size and formalising a service model.
• Played a key role in bringing GitLab's dark mode to general availability resolving the most upvoted issue in GitLab's history. Working across multiple teams, identified the patterns, tokens, and rules needed to ship platform-wide, ensuring designers and engineers wouldn't need to build or check for both modes twice.
• Co-led design token implementation with engineering: built a system to build over 1,100 design tokens from ~60 DTCG-format source files for 6 destinations, with theme-aware colours emitted in both light and dark variants. Created a pilot programme to reduce risk, then applied learnings to naming, categorisation, syncing pipelines, and Figma variables.
• Resolved 20+ WCAG findings from an independent Deque audit (several in Pajamas design system components, propagating to hundreds of GitLab pages) including screen reader announcements, ARIA attributes, and keyboard navigation, improving compliance and accessibility for users with disabilities.
• Upheld and influenced quality, craft, consistency and standards through 695 merge request reviews across GitLab. Helping teams move faster together within a shared system.
• Gave teams confidence to apply Figma library updates by shaping and delivering a breaking change process. Increased update awareness by establishing a consistent UI kit release cadence and communication plan.
• Identified an opportunity to improve AI code→Figma workflows and led a spike to explore gains and pitfalls. Implemented a key finding to build guardrails to enable AI to understand the design system through Figma Console MCP and Code Connect. Achieved 80% coverage of components.

Produce beautiful digital creative work for household brand names and global institutions. Create great user experiences that make a difference to the lives of real people. Build on user research and testing insights from quantitative and qualitative sources. Collaborate with stakeholders, domain experts and multidisciplinary teams in an open design process. Generate, edit and test ideas that solve user centred problems. Find opportunities to increase collaboration and improve ways of working. Design interactions that people love to use. Responsible for the end to end product design process of enterprise web solutions. Agile human centred delivery, embedded in development team sprints or as a consultant. A primary focus on prototyping, interaction design, design systems and product strategy. Recent work includes:

• Design systems: Create, document and maintain scalable design systems from scratch for clients. With a strong understanding of consistency, space, typography, colour and attention to the details. Working with tech and product leads to balance vision, utility and feasibility.
• Ecommerce: Work on ecommerce solutions with multiple complex integrations, using user research and analytics to generate insights and identify opportunities. Responsible for the entire customer experience.
• Enterprise: Work on enterprise solutions with multiple complex integrations, collaborating closely with technical leads to simplify complicated experiences, using user research and analytics to generate insights and identify opportunities.

• Lead the creative direction of Imaginet to produce creative and award winning website solutions that achieve online objectives. Producing effective and appropriate designs, information architecture and user journeys that deliver results. Highlights include:
• Led the experimentation programme for NCP's Prebook product.
• Introduced component-led design and build methods based on atomic design principles; developed documentation standards that transformed design–development collaboration.
• Presented winning pitches; contributed to estimations, proposals and tender bids.
• Won Best e-publication, Alan Ball Award 2018, for Poole, the First World War and its Legacy (Poole Museum).

• Designed mobile platforms and campaigns in high-growth and emerging markets for clients including Google, Virgin Group, Red Bull, Comic Relief, Banco Santander, the UN and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
• Worked on an online qualifications platform for Virgin Group, a digital solutions accelerator for the governments of Mexico and the United Kingdom, and campaigns showcasing Wales' creative output for the Welsh Government.

• Helped clients realise creative outcomes to design challenges — websites, brands, graphics and event experiences.
• Worked across retail, broadcast media, hospitality & events, fashion, sport, music and fitness.

• Booked, promoted and ran fortnightly drum & bass events for audiences of 300–2,000 in Cardiff and beyond.
• 150 shows across seven years — good people dancing to good music.