The Hills
Walking the Wainwrights, slowly.
13 down, 201 to go.
Chris Gibbons
Technical Specialist, front-end and design systems.
Twenty years at the border of design and engineering. Still not picking a side. I make it easier for other people to do good work.
Derwentwater
Currently
Design systems at Royal London.
Token foundations, pipeline architecture, and testing across modes. Accessibility as a quality baseline, not an afterthought.
Selected work
All work-
Aug 2026 – Present
Royal London · Digital Engineering
Technical Specialist (Web Development)
Technical strategy and standards across Digital, plus consultancy and coaching for teams.
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Jun 2024 – Aug 2026
Royal London · Design system
Royal London Design System
Token strategy, design-to-code pipeline, accessibility as a quality baseline.
Case study -
2023 – 2024
AND Digital · Consultancy
Tech Principal – Front-End
Raising front-end standards across client teams.
Recent writing
All writing-
Journal · Accessibility
You've Made a Start. Then What?
Audits don't sustain accessibility. Roles do. Notes from inside the work.
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Journal · Accessibility
What Good Actually Looks Like
Three pieces on how accessibility fails. One on what progress actually looks like. And why even that isn't the full story.
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Journal · Accessibility
The Organisation That Never Prioritised It
Engineering fails. Design fails. But both of those failures have a common source: organisations that never valued accessibility in the first place.
Away from the desk
Photography
Fuji X-T1
The camera's been with me for years and it's going nowhere.
Coffee, obviously
AeroPress and a Porlex grinder
Beans from ManCoCo, Atkinsons, or Carvetti. It's a whole thing.