Year-In-Review: 2025 Was About Taking Initiative

December 31, 2025

In like a lion, out like a lamb, or lion? I dunno. The word of the year is initiative. The end of 2024 threw a shitty situation at us where we had to shift gears. Rather than wallowing in the unfortunate situation, we quickly took initiative by creating a course on something that we have been neck-deep in for many years: design tokens. We opened up the door for preorders at the end of 2024, and we are incredibly grateful for the people who trusted us enough to get the course before we finished it. In terms of life, things were busy but mostly uneventful. Now that we are in this new path, we are able to be our genuine selves. We are able to help more than just the Fortune 500 company teams that we used to primarily work with. It feels good and now that we have created solid ground under our feet, we hope to continue to share our knowledge and compassion with the world.

2025 Work

Work in 2025 was a change from the client work that we had in 2024. Here's a quick summary of what we did on the work front:

Created our design tokens course Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens
Gave a talk with Brad at IXDA Pittsburgh meetup
Gave a design tokens workshop and talk with Brad at CSS Day in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Gave a design tokens workshop and performance with Brad at Beyond Tellerand in Berlin, Germany
Created preorders for Brad's Atomic Design course
Created preorders for our collaboration course with TJ Pitre on AI & Design Systems
Helping to create something that is a secret at the moment
Created a design system for the Brad Frost Web brand
Put a more organized infrastructure in place
Brought a wonderful apprentice on board to help us while we helped them
Brought several other amazing folks to help us create our infrastructure while we also help guide them in the things they are doing.
Had our first big Black Friday sale
Redesigned and replatformed this website in 3 days
Brad and I celebrated 10 years of working together.

I'm sure I missed something there, but this is the main gist.

Course Work

The design tokens course helped put food on our families' tables and because of that, I am forever grateful to those who spent the money to support us. When we got a solid amount of people preordering at the end of 2024 and in the early part of 2025, we felt the urgency to get the content out the door for those participants. However, we quickly realized that there needed to be a balance between urgency and being thorough. Brad and I had a lot of discussions to make sure that we left no stone unturned. The goal was to create something that wasn't hand-wavy, but practical. Helpful for beginners and experts, designers and developers, leadership and practitioners, and design system makers and users.

We also quickly learned that there's a lot of frickin' work that goes into creating a course. We could probably create a course on how to create and manage a course at this point. Here's some of the things:

Learning platform. We chose Thinkific because it handled the transactions as well as the course content. While we could've created our own, we figured the fees were worth the peace-of-mind and one-locations for managing lessons and users.
Course website. Thinkfic provides some limited stuff, but we're web designers/developers and want full customization.
Newsletter and course emails. Mailchimp and Thinkific tag-team this
Email admin. I wrote a lot of emails. Jelly is a wonderful tool for team collaboration.
Video recording, editing, and publishing. This was big and Descript is a lovely tool to make the recording, editing, and publishing process more efficient. Also realized we needed better gear and a green screen as we got into things.
Demos. Lots of demos. We created a fake ice cream company and built design token system around it. Figma was used. Cursor and Storybook was used. Also created iOS, Android, and React Native apps. Installed automation tools between environments to demo those. Making sure to provide the easiest setup process possible for the design token architecture. Demos themselves are a lot of work for something very much in the weeds.
Marketing but not in an annoying way. Authenticity is what we strive for and we don't want to bombard people with advertising, but we want to get the word out.
Making sure that the course provides core concepts and guidance that isn't tool-specific, dependent on a certain payment plan (e.g. Figma Enterprise plan), or for a specific expertise.

I'm definitely missing some other stuff here, but the good news is that now that we have learned all about this process, we can reuse and improve these processes as we continue to put out our other courses.

Workshops

In addition to the course, we had a few in-person workshops that incorporated our course work into them. We were able to give a quick talk at the IXDA Pittsburgh meetup before taking the workshop across the Atlanic Ocean to CSS Day in Amsterdam and Beyond Tellerand in Berlin. This was new territory for me, not just because it was my first time to mainland Europe, but because I wasn't usually the one giving talks and workshops. It was good to meet new people, hear their feedback, and nerd out together on design tokens. Both of these conferences are amazing and do a great job of bringing the humanity part of our jobs into the fold. In Amsterdam I gave a talk alongside Brad that went well (even if my joke was terrible). In Berlin, we got to put on a performance: Brad was on bass guitar and I was on drums. Brad didn't talk which is hard to believe. It was an amazing feeling to play music on stage again while promoting a positive message. After that, we hosted a jam session at the after party. Playing Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, and other cover songs with a bunch of Germans was so much fun. You couldn't wipe the smile off my face. What a breath of fresh air enjoying life with people from many different cultures this year. It's a good reminder of how good you can feel when people come together to be present.

Bringing People Into The Fold

Because our design tokens course brought a lot of people into our Subatomic community in Slack, we realized how many amazing people were in there. We also received a lot of emails from people who were struggling to find work and needed some help to get access to the course. Brad and I talk a lot about wanting to help people. So we decided to create an apprenticeship program and put the word out. We received a lot of lovely emails from people who told us about them as human beings rather than the "I have experience in React" stuff you find on resumes. We narrowed it down to a small number of people to interview and met them in person. While there were so many great folks that we met, we picked our apprentice. She helped us create websites for some of the projects we worked/are working on and we were able to help her understand the front-end developer workflow better. More importantly, we had a lot of great conversations about humanity and life in 2025 and how to navigate this crazy time we are in right now. It felt like time went quickly before the 3-month period was done, but we are thankful for the time with her to help each other out and enjoy just hanging out.

Because the apprenticeship ended up diving deeper into the personal front in addition to the work front, we really wanted to provide a similar experience to other people. While we realized we couldn't help everyone, we thought paying something to someone and providing guidance to people in exchange for their help would be worth it. So we brought on a great group of people who have been helping us with some of the more production work as well as infrastuctural work. Being able to talk more in-depth with people about their human self rather than what they're working on is always so refreshing. I loved doing that in our client work and it is nice to feel that connection with people again in addition to teaching and learning from them.

Note: I'm not using names since I haven't asked these people for permission. I'm trying to respect their privacy.

Rebranded and replatformed my site

If you can't tell, I rebranded my site to something that feels less cartoony (okay there is still the snowman) and more professional. I also replatformed because WordPress became a bit of a hassle to manage. I needed simpler. So Eleventy has become the platform and I am grateful to the Eleventy team for this plugin that made things a lot faster. I started off with a WordPress site because I started my brand off as a meteorologist, not a web developer. Now that I have been doing this for a long time now, I can manage a repository that I have full control over. I hope to write more and share more in 2026 on here.

2025 Life

Life was uncertain early on in 2025 because of our unfortunate situation. Thankfully, I have an amazing wife and a curious son who bring me so much joy every single day. Making them happy and providing them with comfort is a big reason why I work so hard. To be able to be in a much better situation at the end of 2025 is a testament to the hard work that we did as a team on the work front. I joined a tennis league which was a lot of fun and a good way to meet some good people. We were also able to fit in a lot of travel for pleasure in addition to work travel.

Life and work blend together because...well I work with my brother. 2025 was a big year because I had 2 anniversaries to celebrate: my 10 year anniversary with my wife and my 10 year workiversary with Brad.

10 Year Anniversary with My Wife

My wife and I celebrated 10 years of marriage. It was a big milestone for many reasons, but when you are high school sweethearts and long distant for 8 years before you get married, the odds are against you. We took a trip with our son to Glacier National Park, Banff, and Hood River as a way to celebrate. Being able to celebrate that milestone in stunning places with the two most important people in my life was wonderful. If you have kids, you realized that their perspective allows you to see the beauty in a much deeper, child-like way again. It was so much fun and really recharged my batteries, even if I hiked a lot of miles with a toddler on my back.

10 Year Workiversary with Brad

To celebrate 10 years of working together, we went to Portugal (Brad was already there for a conference) and Switzerland, and then ended it at CSS Day in Amsterdam to give a workshop and talk together. What an absolutely amazing trip and I am grateful to have that time to climb mountains and drink beer/eat good food while looking at those same mountains.

Now to get deep.

Brad wrote a nice post about our 10 year workiversary from his perspective back around when it happened, and I am late to the party with the reciprocation.

If I was a true Frost man, my only acknowledgement of our workiversary would be this:

However, I am contractually obligated to write nice things about Brad, so here we go. If I had one word to describe working with Brad it would be nightmare. "Don't you know who I am?! I created Atomic Design!," he would scream at me after throwing the coffee I brought to him in my face. It's been like that for 10 years, and I'm still somehow stuck here.

In all seriousness, though, you don't need to be Brad's brother to know who he is. What you see from the outside is who he is when you're lucky enough to sit beside him for a decade because he has always been transparent with how he feels about something. There's likely a blog post somewhere with his reaction to that thing.

Brad gave me a chance when no one else would. I looked for a job in meteorology or something similar for 2 years with no luck. I was working my 3AM-12PM shift at my meteorology job outside of Washington, D.C. when Brad messaged and asked if I wanted to help him out for 3 months so I'd have work after moving to Pittsburgh to be with my wife. I said, "Yes," and have regretted it ever since. It's the decision that changed the trajectory of my life and I am forever grateful.

We started out as a scrappy team, sharing the same desk. Then upgraded to an adjustable standing desk. Then decided that we never wanted to stand or sit at the same time, so we got 2 smaller adjustable standing desks that we still have today. I am convinced this is the sole reason why we collaborate so well and can still get along today. That, and having to maintain that aggressive bamboo in your yard.

I think the strong values that our grandparents and parents taught us have helped us get to 10 years. Family is everything. Help someone out. Work hard. Show up. Those values didn't need to be verbally said to us, they were shown to us. I think there's a lot to be said about showing rather than saying it, especially with social media nowadays. We've always been a "stop talking about it" and "just do it" kind of team.

It feels like just yesterday we built Death To Bullshit or that I drove you out to pick up your Atomic Design books followed by a book order family fulfillment session and many trips to the post office to send the books out. It turns out that book would do you some good over the years.

Now here we are 10 years later, with the best logo wall a front-end developer consultant can ask for. Brad is now THE Brad Frost with lots of admirers from around the world. It's weird when your brother is this odd web design celebrity. He's still just my brother to me because that hasn't changed what his core values are. Family is everything, help someone out, work hard, and show up. His Bluesky account even says something similar: "Work hard. Don't be an asshole. Share what you know." He didn't just fall into being liked randomly, he showed it to the world by being the creative, risk-taking individual that he is. He earned his reputation by doing those things.

I used to joke around with my friends that my job was to make Brad look good. And while he doesn't need my help to put good stuff into the world, I hope that me being around these past 10 years has helped a little bit. I've been lucky enough to have two older siblings that I look up to and admire greatly, and even luckier to get to work with one of them.

Cheers to another however many years of building cool stuff, quoting Happy Gilmore, making poop jokes, and playing music. Thanks for giving me a chance. I love you.

What About 2026?

I think it's safe to say that we don't have any shortage of stuff to do in 2026. I think our goal is sustainability now. Making sure we have enough to support our lives while also not spreading ourselves too thin.

The Atomic Design course and the AI & Design Systems course will be the focus starting the new year. We also have a client project that will be nice to get back into as well. We'll also focus on infrastuctural things and trying to make things more efficient, After all, we are design systems specialists. We'll likely have some workshops here and there as well. There's also some oher background projects going on. It's funny that we've been doing stuff for clients for so long that we are finally getting around to establishing that stuff for ourselves. We'll continue to do our best to be genuine and helpful human beings.

Personally, I'd love to write more blog posts. Help people where I can. Play more music. Enjoy time with family. Maybe travel. We'll see what this new year brings.

Thanks for reading everyone. If you made it this far, I applaud you. Lots going on that I wanted to share. In the meantime, have a wonderful rest of your holiday season! Keep on doing good in the world.