The Personal Homepage of Luke Murphy
Still Here
I'm a designer, tinkerer, writer, and speaker. I currently work at zeroheight as a Principal Design Advocate, and used to work at Memrise, Microsoft, and Mr & Mrs Smith (amongst others). I also run Nothing Sounds Good, co-host the Design Systems WTF podcast, and generally do too many side projects.
I am currently building this site as I go, so it might be buggy af. Want to follow the progress? Follow me on Bluesky.
<Things I'm Proud Of>
Baseline Design System
Baseline Design System
An enterprise-level design system and suite of Figma plugins, built from scratch for zeroheight: multi-brand tokens, a React library, Storybook, and docs that could ship a real product.
Nothing Sounds Good
Nothing Sounds Good
A vinyl subscription box sending DIY indie, punk and emo records to UK subscribers every month. I'm Creative Director and Head of Product. My second vinyl subscription after Wax & Stamp.
Hatch 2023
Hatch 2023
My Hatch 2023 talk on how design systems can encode exclusion, and what we can do to stop reinforcing systems of harm by accident.
Maturity
Design System Maturity Model
A new way to think about design system maturity, written for zeroheight. Practical framing for teams figuring out where they are and what to do next.
Los Campesinos!
Los Campesinos! Football References
A mini digital zine cataloguing every football reference buried in the Los Campesinos! catalogue. Originally written for the Nothing Sounds Good zine, then expanded into a full interactive piece.
<Manifesto>
Why start a page with a boring about section? Well, this is still a boring about section, but restyled in the form of a manifesto. You possibly want to know a bit more about me, but I also think it’s important to share the things you indelibly believe in at the same time.
So, let’s start with the basic stuff to get it out of the way. I’m a 40-something person who has spent most of their career in some mixture of product design, front-end development, writing and speaking, and carrying on too many side projects to feasibly keep going. My pronouns are they/them (using the correct pronouns makes you a cooler person. Fact), and I currently call Letchworth Garden City, UK my home.
I believe in making things for the internet that don’t suck, both from a ‘putting joy into the world’ point of view, as well as a ‘not making things shitty for people by not thinking about accessibility and inclusivity’.
I believe that trans rights are human rights, that borders shouldn’t exist, that diversity and equity should be front and centre of most things, and that Josie and the Pussycats is the greatest film of all-time.
