PHILIP LEVY

My Work

Here are some examples of my recent work. It’s organized by things I do with my colleagues at work and things I do with my family at home.

@Work: Head of Design

Most recently, I led the design team at Bixal where we’re using human-centered design and agile mindsets and methods to improve the customer experience of the federal government.

USWDS Screener Prototyping Tool

A customizable form for prototyping a screener experience using the U.S. Web Design System and GitHub Pages. The template can be copied and modified without any installs or local builds.

Web-based presentation template

A template for creating web-based presentation slides using the U.S. Web Design System and Bixal branding. Built with accessibility in mind, it includes common templates, automated slide navigation, and presenter notes.

USWDS Design Tokens Guide

A guide for helping designers progressively understand and apply the use of design tokens in their work — ultimately increasing adoption of the U.S. Web Design System among digital services teams working on government websites.

USWDS Page Templates

A library of page templates using the U.S. Web Design System for both web and Figma. We built this collection of components and layouts to accelerate our rapid web prototyping activities.

Bixal Methods Toolkit

To help make the planning and execution of our activities easier for us and more accessible for others on our teams, we’re developing this internal toolkit based on the 18F original. The goal is to have it continually reflect our current practice.

UX Design Practice Charter

At Bixal, we’re in the process of articulating our practices across the organization. This charter represents my and my team’s thinking of what we do and how we do it. I built the site in Webflow and migrated it to GitHub.

Other tinkering I’ve done at work

New Tweetto Burrito: Generate “call-to-tweet” links for your email newsletters and websites to make it super-simple for your audience to shout you out on Twitter — like this!
No-Code API with GitHub Pages: With the goal of making it as easy as possible to turn a CSV file into a free, read-only API without touching any code, I created this project that only requires 3 simple steps: clone the template, replace the data file, and turn on GitHub Pages.
Markdown Flows: Inspired by Laurent Baumann’s uxmd, I built a tool for creating simple user interaction flows using Markdown and some very basic JavaScript leveraging the Codepen web-based, social coding platform.
Plain Vanilla GitHub Pages: To make it as easy as possible for less-technical people like me to create basic websites for free on GitHub Pages, I set up this repository template with instructions.

Looking at ways to apply it to the Federal Government space @bixal. On a personal note, using some of the concepts with my teen and pre-teen to get them thinking more entrepreneurially.
— Philip Levy (@pglevy) July 9, 2020

@Home: Chief Entrepreneurship Officer

Our family of four runs a modified version of “startup and experiment cycles,” inspired by Shape Up, to encourage an entrepreneurial mindset and practice at home. These are some of our projects over the past year. All of these sites (except for the e-commerce one) are built with Jekyll in public repos on GitHub.

Money Moves for Teens

During quarantine, my daughter launched a podcast focused on financial health for her fellow teens. She’s already released almost two dozen episodes and racked up thousands of plays.

Sophia Music Studio

My wife has taught voice and piano for many years, but she tired of the monotony of ongoing lessons, so we reimagined and re-launched her business as a project-based service.

At 14, my daughter already grasps the time value of money. And she's sharing it in a podcast! (@moneymoves14s) At 14, I was probably dropping firecrackers in a sewer. I feel like that's generational progress.
— Philip Levy (@pglevy) October 1, 2020

Other startups and experiments we’ve run

Talia’s Tutoring: my daughter’s math tutoring service.
Frac/tion Clothing: my son’s clothing and lifestyle brand.
Budget Booster: a concept for a personal budget coaching service.

About me

I believe in the power of design thinking and doing as a positive force for the healthy growth and continuous improvement of mission-driven organizations.

I started my educational journey in music production and engineering and wound my way through web development and instructional design before discovering experience and product design.

I’m interested in all things that involve value creation and exchange, from a personal level all the way up through teams, organizations, and communities.

Hi! I’m Philip. Welcome to my portfolio.