Cole Bemis is a design engineer with 11 years of experience building polished developer-facing tools and design systems from San Francisco. He spent a significant portion of his career at GitHub—rising through design-systems roles into GitHub Next—then moved to Notion, where he continues blending research, product, and engineering. Cole is the creator of the popular open-source feather icons and has contributed to core GitHub design projects like Primer and Octicons, demonstrating strong front-end and component library expertise. His work repeatedly focuses on usable abstractions: reusable UI components, icon systems, and editor tooling that surface complex structure simply. He combines practical engineering (webpack/Babel, Vue/React) with a designer’s attention to motion and documentation, improving both developer experience and end-user UI. Beyond code, he favors building tools that help people who build things, often solving meta problems about how teams ship interfaces.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Riverdale High School
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Contributions:50 releases, 22 reviews, 547 commits in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Cole primarily contributed to the front-end development of the project, starting with the initial creation of an `index.html` file. They then implemented JavaScript to inject SVG icons into the page and later created a Vue.js application. The user refactored the JavaScript into a dedicated file and set up a webpack configuration to bundle the project, demonstrating a focus on modern front-end development practices. The contributions culminated in a fully functional icon grid using Vue.js and included styling improvements using Tachyons.
An implementation of GitHub's Primer Design System using React
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:1 release, 1389 reviews, 659 commits in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Cole primarily contributed to the development of UI components using React within the Primer Design System. Their work involved fixing bugs, removing unnecessary code, and adding features like a new Grid component and enhanced functionalities for the Link component, as well as ensuring the consistency of the design system. The user also addressed styling and layout improvements, incorporating theming changes to ensure the proper rendering of Primer React components.
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