Hiya.

I’m Bek Stone, a veteran designer, musician, and entrepreneur deeply passionate about people.

I’ve spent my career helping build businesses, both new to market and loved by millions. I’m drawn to the earliest stages of creation—discovering needs, business strategy, brand expression, and the teams and systems necessary to gracefully evolve and scale.

I value empathy and candor, simplifying the complex, serving the underdog, and perpetually learning and accomplishing amazing feats with other hungry hearts and minds.

I live in Oakland with an army of plant babies. When not rocking business pants, I can be found composing music, designing jewelry and apparel, or carving through the Redwoods on a Moto Guzzi named Fusa.

Airbnb:

Scaling the Heart

Building the Design Language System powering Airbnb innovation.

In January of 2015, I joined Airbnb. While the design team of 20 that could fit snugly around a whiteboard would quadruple before my departure less than a year and a half later, a signature climate of warmth never faltered.

Up until this point, Airbnb had grown organically. The widely publicized rebrand six months prior had catapulted an already-valuable service into the “internet darling” stratosphere. 2015 would usher in the company’s first significant investment in global marketing, further extending its reach. Internally, teams were working and growing at a feverish pace.

By July, product design had more than doubled in size. Teams and initiatives across the org struggled to stay in sync. Web, iOS, Android, and Watch each had unique designs and codebases. We needed a shared language and a stable and performant foundation to withstand continued growth.

Our goal was to create a universal design system and I was given the green light to build a dedicated team.

As the founding members began to research and audit, I set out to connect with leaders across the organization to gain understanding, exchange ideas, and develop shared goals for our future. Armed with insights, I drafted our first vision and guiding principles and set the growing team loose to explore and create.

Fonts would be scaled up for legibility. Color contrast boosted to meet new accessibility benchmarks. Bold accents introduced pacing and illustrations rang harmonious with our expanding icon system. Movement brought life. A visual language emerged—vibrant, clear, and as animated and conversational as the dinner table.

Running in parallel were two initiatives introducing radical changes to flows across all platforms. The success of these colossal efforts hinged on having a sound and iconic system to build upon. Quality cannot be defined by external characteristics alone. Reliability and performance are inextricable traits, and required tremendous cooperation across product, engineering, and design to achieve. We focused our efforts on mobile to lead the way.

Equipped with new requirements and our drafted brand language, design leads and executives from our cross-functional teams headed offsite to hash out the first version of Airbnb’s Design Language System. Teams began testing, breaking, and submitting improvements. As the system solidified, I guided adoption, integration, and continued evolution across product teams.

As with any great endeavor, this one too had to travel the difficult but transformative path of discovery. No one solution could meet all needs, and no process could satisfy all those involved. More valuable than the system created were the people it aimed to serve. At last, a shared language was beginning to bridge the gap between disciplines, and something altogether more beautiful was unfolding.

With the rollout underway and an able team in place, I departed from Airbnb—one month before the public launch in April, 2016. The team and their work continue to flourish, driving a greater level of continuity and cross-functional collaboration.

Laying a new foundation and rebuilding a home with a growing family inside was no small feat, and there were countless challenges and opportunities for the organization to learn along the way. In the end, a once small and mighty team empowered Airbnb to scale in new ways—each step more humane than the last.

Encore

Core contributors:
Alex Schleifer, Adam Michela, Karri Saarinen, Michael Bachand, Paul Kompfner, Sean Abraham, Salih Abdul-Karim, Michael Sui, Jing Jian, Britt Nelson, Hannah Hughes, Luke Carter, Stephen Wyatt Bush.

Invaluable partners:
Katie Dill, Amber Cartwright, Allen Mask, Taido Nakajima, Katie Chen, Adam Glynn-Finnegan, Kevin Grennan, Alvin Hsia, Shane Allen, Charlie Aufmann.

Related articles

A Design System to Take on the World
by Tanya Combrinck

The Way We Build
by Alex Schleifer

Creating the Airbnb Design System
by Karri Saarinen

Communicating Clarity and Charm
by Google Design

Making and breaking

Highlights from humanizing brands and digital experiences, constructing environments, and exploring physical forms and materials.

Bek is one of those rare leaders that boldly balances hands-on relevancy with clear visioned execution.

Ryan Northway
Principal Product Designer, Real Labs

A shining star in a sea of sameness, an invigorator, an inspiration.

Benjamin Roy
Director, Venture Visuals

At Airbnb, Bek took on some of the hardest design and business problems using her skills to get everyone, from the CEO to her engineering counterparts bought in.

Kevin Grennan
Design, Sidewalk Labs

As magnetic as she is humble, Bek rallies teams to solve problems with systems thinking, minimalism, curiosity, and diagrams of happiness curves.

Michael Austin Sui
Inclusive Design Lead, Airbnb

Bek is just one of the most well-rounded, human-centric, passionate leaders you’ll meet. She inspires people to be better — that’s her superpower.

Jing Jian
Design Lead, Motion