Thinkmill News.

Nov 20th, 2023 · Case studies

We helped an award-winning home loan provider unveil their new brand with the launch of two websites

Nov 10th, 2023 · Case studies

We helped ELMO build an award-winning design system to increase UX consistency and developer efficiency

Sep 7th, 2023

Thinkmill turns 10 🎉

In September 2013, our Co-Founders Jed Watson and Boris Bozic officially registered Thinkmill's ABN. From there, we begun our journey as a software consultancy powered by a skilled team of design-engineers, open-source enthusiasts, and problem-solvers. Today, we're still that, with sharper tools and the same goal of building great software. Thank you to our team, friends, and clients who've been a part of our first decade. We naturally had cookies and cake to celebrate. Here's to the next!

Aug 29th, 2023

Designing at scale: an overview of Design Systems

Our Design-engineer Nathan Simpson recently gave a Design Systems talk at Innovate Orange - a technology meetup in regional NSW. Watch the recording for Nathan's high-level overview of Design Systems, and how large organisations can achieve design at scale.

Aug 22nd, 2023 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

An exciting milestone for our Labs team; Astro has released an official guide to using Keystatic as a CMS to power Astro sites.

Aug 15th, 2023

Panellists at Design x Engineering Co-Lab

Our Co-CEO, Boris Bozic, was one of three expert panellists who spoke at the first Design x Engineering Co-Lab on Design Systems, in Sydney. We're proud to have his serious design systems knowledge at the helm of our design-engineering practice. Thank you for the words of wisdom and experience shared by the other panellists, Dominik Wilkowski and Maria Christley; and to Morgan Fletcher for MC-ing the event, and Atlassian for hosting us with an impressive pizza spread. We'll be there for the next.

Jun 23rd, 2023 · Writing

After using Keystatic full-time for about 5 months, I thought I'd share some of the things I really like about it. The talk was at the SydJS meetup, held on the 21st of June 2023 at the Atlassian HQ.

Jun 22nd, 2023 · Case studies

We helped Koala implement a lead capture and onboarding feature, with personalisation capabilities that exceeded expectations

Jun 22nd, 2023 · Case studies

We helped Koala improve their fulfilment ops and expand into new markets with a multichannel serverless integration

May 29th, 2023 · Case studies

We helped Rugby Australia rebuild their publishing infrastructure with Keystone to power the content of 3000 websites

May 26th, 2023 · Writing

How we approach the multi-faceted world of accessible design, and how improvements made for one user group can benefit all of us.

May 25th, 2023 · Writing

We recently wrapped up delivery of a feature for a client’s complex accounting app. The project presented a valuable opportunity to battle-test our thinking around how we build products. We implemented a range of activities and techniques from the Thinkmill Method, and came away with valuable insights related to where it shines, what’s needed in order for it to do so, and how to improve it going forward. Here‘s what we learned along the way.

May 24th, 2023 · Writing

Thinkmill uses a schema-led approach to design, which involves building visual representations of data structures to help teams understand the underlying relationships and dependencies. Recently, we used the Schema Nodes FigJam Widget to visualise the schema and relationships.

May 23rd, 2023 · Writing

The true goal of conducting user research is to test the assumptions that have been made, and bring confidence and clarity to a project and its vision. However, organisations often perceive research as a long, drawn-out process that won't bring value for months. At Thinkmill, we focus on designing user research that can be acted on immediately and will make a substantial difference to your team today.

May 11th, 2023

Jordan Geizer has made another Figma plugin that’s near and dear to our heart. Schema Nodes makes it easy to create a visual representation of your product’s GraphQL schema. Handy for practicing schema-led design & engineering.

May 1st, 2023

A group of Thinkmillers returned to Chennai to present a progress update of the work we’re doing for the team at Anywhere Works, and share best practices for effective cross–functional product design & development.

Apr 13th, 2023

​Accessibility in Design Systems

Jordan Overbye spoke at React Sydney about our collaboration with the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry to implement AgDS – a modern and accessible React Design System. AgDS achieved AA-level compliance against WCAG 2.1 and is noted as an exemplary implementation of an accessible React-based design system by independent accessibility consultants, Intopia.

Apr 13th, 2023

Meet Keystatic

Thinkmill founder Jed Watson introduced React Sydney to Keystatic our new file-based content management system that makes Markdown, JSON and YAML content in your codebase editable by humans.

Apr 2nd, 2023 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Using Keystatic with Astro’s Content Collections

Simon has a new video walking you through the process of implementing Keystatic to power parts of the site you’re on right now! Built with Astro, this site leverages the power of two new features recently added to the framework: Markdoc, and Content Collections.

Mar 31st, 2023

The Labs team are making great strides with their new codebase-friendly CMS: Keystatic. Here’s an example of how a good design system can turbocharge front-end development.

Mar 20th, 2023 · Writing

A Route Map is essentially a lightweight URL schema for an app or experience. This is how we use it.

Mar 15th, 2023

Celebrating a decade of partnership with P.JOHNSON

This month, we celebrated P.Johnson being a Thinkmill client for 10+ years — and a true partner. Not only did our co-founder’s wedding see the groom and his groomsmen don P.Johnson suits, but we’re proud to have grown together with them over this decade of learning and progress. Here’s to the next decade of success (and weddings).

Mar 8th, 2023

Project walkthrough: Agriculture Design System

Watch Jordan Overbye and Nathan Simpson outline the origins of our recent collaboration with the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry to implement a modern and accessible React Design System.

Mar 3rd, 2023 · Writing

Empathising with your blind users to create better experiences for all.

Feb 28th, 2023 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Serverless website & booking system with Keystone, Planetscale, Vercel, & Next.js

Josh Calder has open-sourced a new website he built for his wife’s performing arts business. It lets students view a timetable, check fees, find available lesson times, and enrol through a portal. It combines Planetscale and Vercel to make for a fully “serverless” Keystone stack.

Feb 23rd, 2023 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Our latest R&D project, Keystatic, is ‘officially’ in early access, with some handy templates and this step-by-step guide . Like most of the innovation borne of Thinkmill Labs, Keystatic is in its fledgling stage. There are some rough edges, and we’d love your feedback to keep the wheels of innovation turning. Join our community and follow @thekeystatic on Twitter for everything else.

Feb 23rd, 2023 · Writing

Tips and tricks to get your team’s collective intelligence buzzing in product development.

Feb 22nd, 2023 · Writing

Orienteering aims to better align a consultant’s mindset with the real-world experience and evolve their way of thinking in a more sustainable way.

Feb 22nd, 2023 · Writing

Artefacts are a guaranteed by-product of software development and managing them effectively is important. This article aims to give deeper insight into what we mean when we say artefacts and highlight some key shortcomings as well as the strategies we’ve found to overcome them.

Feb 21st, 2023 · Writing

An approach to rapidly building and evolving layouts as a project progresses and becomes more defined.

Feb 20th, 2023 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Keystatic’s now on Twitter 🐦. Follow along to stay connected to the latest news.

Feb 19th, 2023 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Livestream: landing page with Keystatic, Tailwind, and Next.js

We’re working on a few Keystatic starter templates for devs interested in early access. Watch Simon livestream the build of our first example – a marketing website landing page.

Feb 10th, 2023 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Our new database-free CMS experiment is up on GitHub

While it’s still early days for this project, you can now take "Keystatic" (working title) for a test drive. For more info checkout the README.

Feb 10th, 2023 · Writing

How the work we do in open source and client services drives our craft to new levels.

Feb 9th, 2023 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

The Labs team is working on a new and exciting way to work within content inside git-native workflow.

Feb 8th, 2023 · Writing

The mindsets, principles, and enablers that shape how we build great products.

Jan 25th, 2023

Design, content, & code in parallel: Thinkmill’s new website

Simon made a playback of an internal team presentation we did this week. It looks at how we built the new Thinkmill website in a hyper-iterative way; with content, design, and code evolving in parallel streams. Our journey to launch presented an interesting set of challenges and learning opportunities.

Jan 25th, 2023

Simon V has a new article that shows you how to produce landscape and portrait formatted videos from the same footage.

Jan 13th, 2023

How we built our website newsfeed

This newsfeed you’re reading is a recent addition to the Thinkmill site. Here’s Tom Whitaker with an inside look at how we built the feed to surface material from a wide range of content types including articles, snippets, events, case studies, and more.

Dec 23rd, 2022

And just like that, we’re reflecting on 2022! It’s been a year that has challenged and rewarded us, brought growth and fun. So, we took a moment to thank some of our best partners: our clients. Thanks to Urban Plant Growers for creating these EcoKitchens, which give sustainable, real-life flavour to gifting (with a touch of tech, of course). Our clients give us the opportunity to do what we love -- to solve complex software problems together, and sharpen our tools as we go. Cheers to a 2023 of more successes and tasty, herbaceous salads.

Dec 22nd, 2022

Dinesh has released a series of beautiful, performant, and accessible blog templates for Astro.

Dec 21st, 2022

Design System Talks: Using CSS logical properties for internationalisation

In this first-ever Thinkmill recording, we reveal the juiciest bits of an internal Slack discussion on design systems and logical properties. Served up with a dose of casual chat, two of our design systems experts, Joss Mackison and Luke Bennett, unpack best practices for the use of CSS logical properties for better internationalisation in design systems.

Dec 14th, 2022 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Dinesh gives a run through of how you can use Keystone as a data layer in a Next.js project.

Dec 13th, 2022 · Writing

Medium has a feature that lets readers share selected article text straight to Twitter — without having to copy, paste and edit. It’s a cool way to support sharing without drawing the user too far away from their reading experience. But, that same nifty sharing feature isn’t available for all the great content on the internet.

Nov 21st, 2022 · Case studies

We helped Vocal scale from a hunch to a multi-million user publishing platform

Nov 2nd, 2022

Dinesh made a handy tool to let you embed text into Open Graph images for social sharing purposes.

Nov 1st, 2022

Talking remote-first work at the Tech Council of Australia

Jed was invited by The Tech Council of Australia to talk at their showcase on the future of work. As a panel member, Jed shared Thinkmill’s experience of working in a Covid-era, how our business has been successfully navigating a remote-first approach since 2019, and what the future of our HQ may be. As a member of the TCA, we’re able to give a voice to software R&D and tech, from the trenches of community and innovation.

Oct 27th, 2022

Luke Bennett special guests on The NavBar pod

Luke Bennett joined Simon & John from The NavBar to review the exciting new announcements at Next Conf 2022, and the release of Next.js 13.

Oct 27th, 2022

Delightful products, the Antifragile way

Boris recently spoke at Dovetail about our method for building great products within cross-functional teams.

Oct 25th, 2022

Jed & Alex traveled to India for a week-long code/design audit and training workshop with a new client. We’re helping them find better ways of working and levelling-up their codebase and design system to support future growth.

Oct 24th, 2022 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

One of the community’s most highly requested features. Singletons give you an easy way to work with lists that will only ever have one item. Think website configs, global navigation, and user settings.

Oct 24th, 2022 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Stay connected to all the latest news and developments in our open source app backend framework.

Oct 20th, 2022 · Case studies

We helped Dovetail build and launch Outlier – a unique blog experience for sharing delightful product stories

Oct 9th, 2022

Schema-driven Development

Dinesh recently gave a lightning talk at Sydney’s Web Directions Meetup on schema-driven development. Here’s a quick recap in case you missed it.

Oct 9th, 2022 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Dinesh has a great post about making static blogs using Keystone.

Oct 3rd, 2022

Our open source JSON linter CLI Manypkg is now recommended in the Turborepo docs

Sep 27th, 2022

Sep 20th, 2022 · Case studies

We helped ReachOut rebuild their mobile apps while coaching their team in React Native architecture and best practices

Sep 20th, 2022 · Case studies

We helped an Australian Government department build a Design System to support their digital transformation goals

Sep 20th, 2022 · Writing

Highlights from Perth’s annual inclusive conference for the tech community.

Sep 16th, 2022

Congrats to our strategic partner Meld Studios for winning Good Design team of the year for 2022 🥳

Sep 15th, 2022

We’re really proud to see so much adoption of our OSS tools

Sep 15th, 2022

Single source of truth development

Jed demonstrates an end-to-end project using Prisma, Keystone, GraphQL, TypeScript and Next.js where everything is derived from a single source of truth for the schema and types.

Sep 9th, 2022

How to establish multi-disciplinary teams to effectively design and build products

Lauren recently co-presented with Meld presented at UX Australia 2022 about how to establish multi-disciplinary teams to effectively design and build products.

Sep 8th, 2022 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Joss has released a new open source collection of utilities that smooth out the rough edges of working with TypeScript.

Sep 8th, 2022

Jordan Geizer has released an update to his awesome Automatic Style Guides plugin. Now with hsla() support.

Aug 9th, 2022

Simon Vrachliotis is making great progress with his upcoming Pro Tailwind course. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s in store:

Jul 27th, 2022 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

The State of Headless CMS

Jed joined a panel of experts to discusses the current state of Headless CMS and what lies over the horizon.

Jul 19th, 2022

Simon has launched a Podcast series

Simon Vrachliotis and his friend John Myers from Supabase have launched the NavBar – a podcast dedicated to web development and content creation. Check out the teaser.

Jul 2nd, 2022 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Introducing KeystoneJS, the CMS & API Platform for Prisma

Jed’s workshop on how to build a polling system into a blog with Keystone, NextJs, GraphQL & Prisma.

Jun 30th, 2022 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

We’ve added support for MySQL to Keystone’s list of DB providers, bringing the total number of supported DB types to three.

May 20th, 2022 · Case studies

We helped Brighte create Spark - a new Design System for their Mobile Apps

Feb 9th, 2022 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Learn Keystone with our new beginner’s series

We’ve released a new learning series for Keystone. Aimed at beginners, the new series shows you how to turn an empty folder into a functioning blog backend with relationships, auth, and session data.

Dec 21st, 2021 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Keystone 6 is now in General Availability!

Today’s Keystone is faster and more flexible than it’s ever been, and is ready for you to build amazing things with.

Oct 22nd, 2021 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Jordan Geizer has released an Automatic Style Guide plugin for Figma that generates (and keeps up to date) formal style guide documentation based on your local Figma styles. Now you can prepare a clean and functional style guide for clients & developers with a click of a button.

Oct 9th, 2021 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Keystone, GraphQL & Prisma

Jed discusses the new Keystone 6 at Prisma’s Korea Meetup

Oct 5th, 2021

We’ve joined the Tech Council of Australia

We’ve joined the Tech Council of Australia to help reach 1m tech jobs by 2025

Sep 20th, 2021 · Case studies

We helped Breville build their first mobile app for next-gen sous vide commercial cooking appliances

Aug 20th, 2021 · Case studies

We helped Enlitic pioneer medical AI for diagnostics and pathology detection

Jul 29th, 2021 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Custom navigation components & custom routes have landed in Keystone

Jul 16th, 2021

Next-gen CMS & GraphQL API with Keystone & Prisma

Jed shared our freshly minted Keystone 6 with the world at Prisma Day conference in July 2021. His talk is a great way learn how Keystones combination of features and flexibility set it apart from other backend frameworks and Content Management Systems

May 20th, 2021 · Case studies

We helped Atlassian adopt React and build the front-end platform that unifies its products

Feb 26th, 2021 · Writing

We put on Australia’s first ever React Conf in February 2020. You won’t believe what happened next!

Nov 14th, 2020

GraphQL for designers

Why do developers love GraphQL and how can designers best work with them?

Nov 11th, 2020

Lifting your Design Systems by focusing on a11y

Examples of awesome a11y things inside design systems.

Nov 1st, 2020

All the ReactConf AU talks

All the recordings from ReactConf AU are available on YouTube. Here’s the full playlist:

Jun 9th, 2020

The "state" of UI

This will come as a surprise to many of you, but user interfaces on the web, have different types of state. It might be that "State", much like "Design Systems", is a word that has lost all meaning for you, but regardless, I think you will agree the UI state designers talk about is different from the application state developers refer to. Let’s figure out how to have a discussion about these similar sounding but very different concepts for the sake of our sanity and better design system components.

Mar 17th, 2020 · Writing

A unique illustration for each presentation

Mar 4th, 2020

Targeted extensibility: Lessons learned from building Atlaskit

Often when building a design system we face tension between consistent and resilient API’s that encapsulate valuable and reusable logic, and sufficient flexibility to ensure that our components can be customised to fit bespoke product use cases. Towing this line is difficult, and becomes more difficult as a design system scales. Charles uncovers some of the hard-learned lessons towing this line in React-Select, and Atlaskit – Atlassian’s Design System.

Mar 4th, 2020

The Value of Open Source

Jed wraps up ReactConf AU by discussing the sustainability of open source, the value OSS creates for us all individually and as a collective, and then proposes some small steps we can all take to ensure the future of our vibrant community.

Mar 4th, 2020

Engineering-led design

Lauren describes the Engineering-led Design mindset, and the 5 behaviours that a cross-disciplinary team can adopt to make work life (and the software we make) better.

Mar 4th, 2020 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Building with Monorepos

Monorepos are everywhere in the React community from design systems and apps to open source libraries. Being able to work on multiple packages together is powerful, but it’s not without its problems. Emma shows you how to solve these problems by exploring the evolution of Emotion’s monorepo.

Dec 30th, 2019 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Keystone featured on the SyntaxFM podcast

Wes Bos talks about Keystone. Best practices, things to avoid, and why you should check it out.

Dec 13th, 2019 · Writing

If you need to inject HTML into your React app and you don’t want to use `dangerouslySetInnerHTML`, this article is for you.

Nov 21st, 2019 · Writing

The year is 2225. Thinkmill has taken to space. Currently orbiting the moon, sending explorers to discover the universe.

Nov 21st, 2019 · Writing

Progressive Rendering is the technique of sequentially rendering portions of a webpage in the server and streaming it to the client in parts without waiting for the whole page to rendered.

Nov 6th, 2019 · Writing

Preconstruct is a build tool for JavaScript packages with first-class support of monorepos and strong opinions to get you back to work faster.

Oct 31st, 2019 · Find out more about ThinkmillLabs

Building React Select

Jed talks about how he accidentally built the most popular React component, experienced death by a hundred props, got buried under hundreds of PRs, invented a component extension API, learned that styles are also a function of state, influenced some major design systems and finally got some sleep.

Sep 14th, 2019 · Writing

Hands down console.log() was, is and will always be the greatest debugging tool of all time.

Aug 15th, 2019 · Writing

Keystone 5 is a scalable platform that allows you to create a highly customised CMS and API in minutes.

Jun 23rd, 2019

How I prototyped a social network with Keystone

Nathan shares how he built "The Garage" – a social network for car lovers, using Keystone 5 and React Native.

Jan 14th, 2019

On design systems legibility

A design system that nobody can understand is a design system nobody can use. This is why good documentation is so key to having a well-used and well-loved design system. I will walk you through two of Atlassian’s documentation sites for the company-wide design system & component library Atlaskit, showing how the content is built and written, and the practical steps you can take immediately to tackle the hard problems around large documentation projects.

Nov 10th, 2018 · Case studies

We helped Reckon implement a unified front-end platform and design system

Mar 16th, 2018

Rebuilding React-Select

Jed discusses the upcoming React Select 2 and his experiences working in open source.

Nov 18th, 2015

Creating Apps with JavaScript

Tom and Boris discuss and demonstrate how (and why) to prototype UI animations and interactions before development, and how to build a native-quality app for SydJS using web technologies.

Nov 18th, 2015

Content Management & Node.js

Oct 22nd, 2015 · Writing

Designing and prototyping the solution is different to prototyping interactions. Appreciating the distinction will help you pick your tools and be more effective at both.

Jun 11th, 2015

Going Mobile with React

Jed shares what we’ve learned approaching the unique challenges of mobile web apps.

Feb 17th, 2015 · Writing

I’m crediting Mark Dalgleish for this one, but I want to make the case because it’s the best alternative I’ve heard to “Isomorphic Javascript”.

Sep 1st, 2014 · Writing

If you want to do something, do it every day. This is the story of my first year writing open-source software.

Aug 3rd, 2014 · Writing

Interaction design with Edge Animate