About

Years ago…

I was in Muir Woods a few years ago. This is a coastal redwood forest—a genuinely spiritual place to visit. The ground is covered in pine needles, there is no noise, the smell is so pure… And you’re surrounded by trees as tall as the Statue of Liberty. It’s truly breathtaking.

When people first moved into the area, they cut down these trees for the lumber but would always leave a few standing. Inevitably, after a short time, those trees that were left would fall over.

You see, even though these trees are hundreds of feet tall, their roots are only about ten feet deep. Those same roots grow out, horizontally, as much as 80 feet and intertwine with roots of other Redwoods in the area. These trees actually hold each other up.

This is what Redwoods is. We need a space to hold each other up, to support each other. I believe there’s an authentic way to do that through this very community and I’m excited to have you along for the journey.

Redwoods is a design system community.

We started in March of 2025 with just a few folks and have grown intentionally to include design system practitioners from around the world.

We’re a bit unique from other groups in the space, in that we are committed to synthesizing the things we learn and sharing back with the larger community. There’s a level of accountability here that keeps us challenged and engaged.

How we show up

We break down that engagement by describing how we show up in a few key ways.

Daily

We use Slack on a daily basis. This gives us async access to each other and a space to dive deep into discussions, organize specific conversations, and generally to learn more about each other and the work we’re doing.

Weekly

Each week Redwoods members share their weekly standup in Slack. This is a check in that covers a success or two we’ve had in the last week, some items we’re working on this week, and any challenges we’re facing. This keeps us in sync with each other and helps surface areas where we can focus our collective brain power each week.

We also have a weekly call on Tuesdays for anyone and everyone to join. It’s not expected that members attend every call, but making space for this is really fun way to engage. Members facilitate these conversations based on the challenges or successes they’re having and we capture collaborative notes in FigJam.

Monthly

On the first Friday of each month we host an All Redwoods call where we catch up and hear what’s happening in the community. In this Zoom call, we often have smaller group activities or guest AMAs.

We also run action groups each month. Every action group has:

• a goal (generally, we want to offer something back to the larger design system community)
• a deadline (we try to keep these to about 30 days)
• an owner (someone to drive the work forward)

All members are welcome to join action groups as they have interest and time. These action groups may co-publish their learnings, develop tools or templates, create presentations, or any other appropriate means of sharing their synthesis.

Quarterly and beyond

Our goal as a community is to host an online event each year where we share what we’ve been up to in our action groups. Members of Redwoods may co-present, offer smaller lightning talks, or deeper dives into specific areas of learning in this organic online format.

Sometimes our Action Groups have a bigger mandate than what can be accomplished in a month. These run over the course of a quarter.