Michael Trilford

Lead Product Designer, Design Systems

I love to validate hypotheses, uncover insights, and solve business and customer problems. With 18 years of web experience, my skills have naturally expanded into UX, front end development, design systems, and increasingly into product strategy. I’m particularly drawn to product management techniques that align teams around customer needs, clarify priorities, and drive outcomes over outputs.

My expertise in design, front end development, and product strategy has helped shape the strategic direction of the design systems at MYOB and Airwallex.

Contact

trilfordm@gmail.com

+61434447445

🖨️ Print resume

Location

Melbourne, VIC

Australia

Skills

Design systems

I craft design systems that teams actually want to use, systems that are reusable, composable, and scalable. By working closely with designers and developers, I ensure both Figma and coded components align from the start, embedding tokenisation, accessibility, and flexibility into the foundation. A great design system isn’t just documentation; it’s a living, evolving product that enables teams to build faster while maintaining consistency and quality. My focus is on reducing friction, increasing adoption, and helping teams create with confidence.

Skill overview

Leading and ensuring components follow the atomic design principles.
Restructuring design systems to use scalable and modular CSS.
Introducing and applying Responsive web design directly into the design systems using CSS.
Applying a baseline grid to achieve vertical rhythm within a design system.
Incorporating a typographic scale into a design system using CSS.
Introducing design tokens to a design system.
Designing and building useful layout components.
Adding usage guidelines to a design system.
Creating a design system UI kit that is 1:1 with the coded source of truth.

Accessibility Experience

Responsive Design: Responsive design is often an overlooked aspect of accessibility. I have deep experience designing and coding device-agnostic interfaces across desktop and mobile. My passion for adaptable web experiences drives me to build composable, flexible components that help product teams create efficient, responsive and inclusive solutions.

Colour Contrast: At Boost (2006 to 2015), working with government clients taught me to check colour contrast for AA and AAA compliance. While visual design wasn’t my main focus at MYOB or Airwallex, I regularly collaborated with visual designers and continue to consider contrast in critiques and component reviews.

Typography: Accessibility and legibility go hand in hand. I apply best practices in font choice and screen-friendly sizing, an approach embedded in my daily work across product and design system roles.

Dynamic UI: I design with user preferences in mind, including zoom and custom text sizing. Using REM units over PX ensures accessibility and responsiveness across devices and browsers.

Screen Readers: I ensure semantic HTML is used as a foundation for screen reader support, applying attributes like alt, aria and role where needed. Tools like TypeScript help enforce accessibility early in development, and my end to end understanding from design to code supports this process.

Keyboard Accessibility: Many of the same foundations that support screen readers also enable strong keyboard navigation. Bespoke components often use non-semantic HTML, so attributes like aria and tabindex are essential. I understand how teams apply these to create smooth keyboard interactions, and this context helps me collaborate effectively with testers and engineers.

Overall: As a design system specialist, I embed accessibility as a core focus. I ensure components are responsive, meet contrast standards, scale effectively and are built on semantic HTML foundations. I also support accessibility education by integrating guidance into design documentation and team workflows, helping others build more inclusive products.

Product Design

As a Product Designer, I'm very passionate about meeting the business objectives, while successfully balancing this with solving customer problems. With this focus on the business and customer lens, I have been building upon my skills within these areas.

WEB DESIGN

I love web design & I have years of responsive web design experience under my belt.

LEAN UX

I have a toolkit of UX techniques that enables me to create, test, discover & solve customer and business problems.

AGILE

I have years of experience working in an agile environment & collaborate well with others to see a project be successful.

Skill overview

Sketch
Creative cloud
Using Design systems
Creating Design systems
Responsive Web Design
iOS Native mobile
Android Native mobile
User discovery scripts
User testing scripts
User discovery recruitment
User testing recruitment
User testing facilitation
Distilling insights
Design sprint facilitation
User journey maps
Roadmap creation
Outcome-based roadmaps (OKR)

Case Study

Design sprints for SME Rural offering • July 2017

Front-end

To be a product designer that focuses on web experiences, I believe it is essential to understand the medium in which I work. From my experience, I know learning code has contributed to creating a well-crafted experience that is performant and has the level of quality I expect in my day-to-day as a Product Designer.

HTML

I have great knowledge of HTML, which lets me create well structured & meaningful mark-up.

CSS

I have a deep understanding of CSS, and this allows me to create layouts in the best possible way.

JQUERY

Learning jQuery enabled me to craft the interactions of websites I have designed, which is used to bring delight to users.

SASS

I have a great understanding of Sass & I will comfortably design & write my code with this wonderful language.

XCODE

Over the past year, I have focused on learning the front-end side of Xcode, which has allowed me to implement my designs.

RAILS

I have experience working with Ruby on Rails to make changes and modifications to the front-end on projects.

REACT

I create reusable components that consist of semantic HTML, visual and responsive styles and required state for components to operate in applications.

VUE

My natural curiosity enables me to easily pick-up other modern Javascript-based frameworks to create reusable components for building web applications.

WEB COMPONENTS

My experience in creating web components allows me to learn how to structure components in a self-contained approach that can be ported to other JS libraries.

Information sourced from Skills

Projects

Andromeda Design System

| 2020 - 2023

As the Design System Lead at Airwallex, I drove the evolution and maintenance of our in-house Design System, enabling seamless collaboration between design and engineering to ensure consistency, efficiency, and scalability. My approach emphasised empowering teams to contribute effectively to the system, fostering alignment across product teams.

To maintain consistency across products during the design exploration phases, we closely integrated UX Guidelines within Figma, ensuring they were always accessible as designers prototyped new experiences. This approach helped designers utilise common patterns across products and avoid introducing multiple variations of similar approaches, aligning design intent with development execution from the outset.

Read more about my approach to collaboration.
Learn more about how I created high-quality guidelines.

Key Contributions

Strategic Planning: Played a pivotal role in strategic decision-making for the Design System, prioritising tasks and aligning with quarterly product goals.
Onboarding: Streamlined the onboarding process for new Product Designers, providing comprehensive guidance on contribution processes, tooling, and best practices.
Documentation & Guidelines: Orchestrated collaborative efforts to enhance our UX documentation. Refocused guidelines to meet evolving product requirements.
Code Reviews: Ensured high-quality contributions to the Frontend Component Library through detailed reviews of coded components, focusing on design token usage and composability.
Design System Council: Provided feedback on emerging patterns and components, facilitated updates, and curated feedback for continuous improvement.
Maintenance of Services: Managed Storybook and aligned Figma UI Kit with the live codebase for consistency across design and development.
Components: Actively enhanced coded components with responsive updates for optimal performance across devices. Maintained the Figma component UI Library, ensuring accessible properties and easy prototyping with component variants.
Collaboration & Communication: Orchestrated effective communication between designers and developers, promoting technical collaboration and efficient development processes.

Throughout my tenure at Airwallex, I've fostered a collaborative Design System environment, delivering robust, scalable, and user-friendly outcomes. I'm eager to leverage my experience to drive design excellence in future opportunities.

Feelix Design System

| 2018 - 2020

I contributed to the evolution of Feelix by shaping its documentation site, collaborating with engineers to develop key components for the MYOB product experience, crafting design tokens, and enhancing responsive design support through CSS contributions.

Design system case studies • June 2018

Rural Accounting for SME

| 2017

In this design sprint, the cross-collaborative group looked to solve known and unknown problems within the Accounting rural space.

Mobile Banking

| 2017

When running a small business, there are some tasks a business owner is required to do, which helps with their tax compliance tasks. One of these tasks is reconciling their expenses to their bank transactions that come into their accounting system. To ensure the experience is an enjoyable and most efficient, the experience is designed to be less of a data-entry task, and more of a simple review.

Served

| 2017-2020

Served is a mobile app that provides a new way of ordering and paying at restaurants. I explored the end-to-end experience of how a user would browse the restaurant menu, right through to settling the bill. With the inconvenience of Covid-19 for restaurants to operate as usual, I have recently explored how to enable this service to allow restaurants to have complete control of home deliveries.

Capture

| 2017

During an MYOB Hackday in 2017, I set out to investigate and create a solution for a well-requested feature.

The capture experience allows business owners to record and store their business-related expenses in a convenient and accessible digital format. By having this document available in the MYOB, the system enables their accountant to have access to all the information they need for the tax period.

Fast forward a few years to 2019, MYOB launched an application called MYOB Capture, that's right, Capture. Where I wasn't involved in this project directly, a lot of the original thinking for the experience remains core to the experience, such as capturing an image of the receipt and uploading to an existing storage facility within the MYOB products, called In-tray.

OnTheWrist

| 2016

Receive timely reminders of incoming & outstanding payments, which allows businesses to keep an eye on their business health, without the overhead of being tied to their desk. This ease of mind enables the business owners to focus on more critical areas, which is running and ensuring their business is thriving.