Joe Farquharson, Visual Language Designer

I work at the intersection of brand identity and product design. Informed as much by art, music, and mathematics as by engineering, I craft visual language from the ground up: the foundations, the logic that binds them, and the design systems that teams build from.

About me

My career spans over two decades in design, the first half building brand identities for agencies in Scotland and the US, the second half architecting design systems that enable design at scale.

In late 2014, I was recruited back to LinkedIn by the Design Systems team founder specifically because of an unusual combination of skills: strong brand identity craft, typography and iconography expertise, and deep systems thinking that bridges brand and product, a combination which shaped everything I built there.

Over the next decade, I owned the foundational backbone of two successive LinkedIn design languages – Art Deco and Mercado – serving hundreds of designers and thousands of engineers across consumer and enterprise products. That means color, typography, iconography, semantic tokens, and more, as well as the architectural decisions that made all of it work together.

A few things I’m particularly proud of:

  • A 20-ramp color system built in close collaboration with brand agency Wolff Olins – designed from the ground up for light/dark mode, brand/marketing/product parity, and guaranteed MAS/WCAG-compliant contrast at every step
  • A semantic token architecture that evolved through multiple major versions (from ~200 tokens to ~1,000 under engineering constraint, back to ~350 through deliberate re-architecture) – which closely aligned with the W3C Design Tokens spec before it became a recommendation
  • A cross-platform typography system built on a mathematically-grounded scale and semantic structure, with localization support for 36 countries and 16 non-Latin scripts, and accessibility-driven font scaling considerations across multiple devices and operating systems
  • An iconography ecosystem visually inspired by LinkedIn’s brand typeface and shape language, plus the engineering asset repo structure, management, and design-release pipeline.

I care about the craft of design systems work: the decisions that don’t show up in a component library but determine whether a design system actually holds together five years later. If that’s the kind of problem you’re trying to solve, let’s talk.

Read more and get in touch via my LinkedIn profile:

linkedin.com/in/joefarquharson