Tony Folenta

Hi, I'm Tony. 👋🏻 I'm a design leader 
with over a decade of experience building design systems, products, and teams.

Experience

Throughout my career, I’ve had the pleasure of building nice websites and apps for screens that live in your pocket, on your desk, in your hands, on your wrist, in your car (one day!), and even stuck to the front of a big red soda fountain.

I do my best work when I’m building design systems, and I thrive in that sweet spot between design and engineering. I’ve worked on a wide range of projects, from small component libraries for indie apps to enterprise-level design system families covering multiple brands, platforms, and products.

Want to know more? Take a look through my work, or get in touch.


The Highlights

2019—2023

At Keller Williams, I led the design systems team until 2023, serving our product development teams and our users — over 180,000 real estate agents, associates, and their clients.

I established the design systems practice at KW in late 2019; as design lead, I created the KW Experience Design System, including component libraries, design tokens, icons, and guidelines spanning multiple brands and products for web and mobile.

To build the system, I hired and managed a cross-functional design systems team, including product designers and engineers; this team owned the development and maintenance of our Figma design libraries and component libraries for web (React) and mobile native (React Native, Flutter).


2021

I helped design and launch Patina, a yoga practice recording and journaling app for iOS from Rodrigo Gutierrez, a former teammate and lead engineer at Strava. I established the look and feel, logo, and visual design system for Patina, and designed many of the initial app features for launch in the fall of 2021.


2017—2019

At Strava, the social network for athletes, I led the design of several key products, including a complete redesign and rebuild of the core Feed and Activity experiences in the Strava app. I also helped establish the Spandex design system and its accompanying iOS component library.


2012–2017

As a visual designer at Odopod in San Francisco, I was lucky to build my foundation designing a broad range of products and platforms for our clients. Through the mentorship of my design manager, I found the sweet spot in my design career — building design systems, and bridging the designer–developer gap.

Some of the highlights: helping design and launch Sony’s live TV platform, building some of the first Material Design products with Google and Samsung, working in-house on an experimental social discovery app with Eventbrite, and launching SpaceX.com.

đź“Ą Download Resume