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 · 8 km by 6 km, north up
Contours every 25 m · Not for navigation
Currently
Front-end standards at Royal London.
Not tied to one team any more. Helping teams make architecture calls, and coaching engineers on accessibility, CSS and web standards.
Selected work
All work-
Aug 2026 – Present
Royal London · Digital Engineering
Technical Specialist (Web Development)
Setting front-end standards across Digital, advising teams and coaching engineers.
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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?
What happens after the audit, and why it has to be somebody's job.
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Journal · Accessibility
What Good Actually Looks Like
Three pieces on how accessibility fails, one on what progress 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.