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L Dante Guarin — Fractional Design Lead · Product Design · Design Systems

Let's Work!

I help growing product teams decide better, build better, and put the design systems in place to scale. Leadership where you need it, hands-on where it counts, and a direct line to Product, Engineering, and your leadership team.

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20+ years of leading design across web, branding and product

How I work

Short-term leadership. Full-time commitment to the work.

I embed with your team rather than operating from the sidelines. I work directly with founders, Product, Engineering, and Design to understand what's getting in the way, establish priorities, and move the work forward.

  • Design leadership

    Direction, critique, team mentorship, hiring, and organizational structure.

  • Product strategy

    Helping teams turn ambiguous problems into something they can actually build.

  • Design systems

    Creating the foundations, standards, and governance that make quality repeatable.

  • Hands-on product design

    Diving into the work when something needs design attention.

  • Interim leadership

    Keeping the team moving when you're between design leaders or building your team.

L Dante Guarin in an A's cap and white-framed glasses, holding up a sneaker.

About me

20+ years in design

I started as a web designer, designing and coding sites for the music industry, professional and consumer brands, and government agencies.

From there I moved into product design: med-tech, marketing tech, data, and B2B enterprise software.

Trusted by

  • Adobe
  • Teamshares
  • Upwork
  • T-Mobile
  • Microsoft
  • Greenpeace International
  • and many more

What I'm known for

Expertise

Expertise

Strategy

Most briefs describe a symptom, so my first job is finding the problem underneath it. At Meroxa, growth had stalled and the instinct was better onboarding. My research showed we'd built the right product for the wrong person, and it led a pivot from a builder tool to a data observability platform that expanded our addressable market 10x.

At Marketo, the new Sky experience had been ready for years, but fewer than 600 users had opted in. Nobody had designed the transition, so we did: a phased hybrid that brought Sky features into the Classic interface first and moved navigation last, so users got the improvements without the disruption. Opt-ins grew from under 600 to more than 5,000.

It starts close to the work. Site visits at MedHost's partner hospitals surfaced a scheduling gap that led them to adopt an in-house tool over third-party calendars. At Sixup, bringing in qualitative research shifted the roadmap's priorities.

Expertise

Systems Thinking

I think in systems first, then UI. A screen is the last step of a chain of decisions about data, ownership and flow, and that chain is usually where the real problem lives. At Teamshares, the ask was "build an ATS." The real problem was a hiring model running on spreadsheets while the company acquired businesses faster than it could place leaders to run them. Designing the system instead of the tool gave the team one source of truth across 80+ acquired companies and placed 20+ leaders.

The same lens shaped the payroll dashboard there. Integration was the expensive part, so we built it once for the whole platform to inherit, and cut the analysis time of the company's financial leads in half. At Marketo, I went after the org model rather than the components, and ran internal workshops on systems thinking. At the healthtech startup I'm with now, every prototype feeds what it learns back into the design system, so each new one starts from more of the product than the last.

Expertise

Design Systems

I founded Marketo's Sky Design System, built the team behind it, and led its evangelism across Marketo's product squads. At Meroxa, I used Tailwind CSS as a solid baseline for the Yoshi Design System. I contributed to the design system at Teamshares, and helped retrofit T-Mobile's Arrow Design System for B2B use in T-Mobile for Business.

Lately I've been making Figma design system libraries AI-ready, and using AI to learn a system's guardrails and build out its assets with far greater efficiency.

A design system documentation site: a sidebar of foundations and components beside a page of brand, background and border colour swatches.

Expertise

Web & Mobile

I started my career writing front-end code, and I still design with how it will be built in mind. At Upwork, I designed collaboration tools for freelancers and clients and shipped the Upwork Teams app on desktop and mobile. At T-Mobile for Business, I led end-to-end design for promotion, trade-in and quote-to-order flows across its B2B surfaces.

At a healthtech startup, I extended the design system to mobile with the same token and component logic as desktop rather than a separate mobile system, so one foundation serves both and nothing drifts between them.

Product & Design

Photography

  • A rusted steel factory window with cracked wired-glass panes and the number 518, set in red brick.

    Nashville, TN Capturing wonderful textures in broken glass, steel and brick.

  • Crushed cars stacked high in a scrapyard under a grey sky, a Dodge truck grille at the bottom.

    Nashville, TN All journeys end.

  • The candy-red dashboard of a classic hot rod with pinstriping, round gauges and a wooden steering wheel.

    San Diego, CA A Sunday at Balboa Park.

  • A dense wall of pink, white, purple and yellow roses and hydrangeas.

    Toronto, Canada A bed of roses.

  • A smiling woman with long braids seen through a car window, the street reflected across the glass.

    Palm Springs, CA Cooling down in the car from 100+ degree heat.

  • My son, with curly hair, looking upward, lit blue from one side and red from the other.

    Lighting Test Shot This is my son as a test subject while testing a new light setup.

  • Sean O'Bryan Smith seated among rows of wooden theater seats, holding a five-string bass.

    Sean O'Bryan Smith Jazz bassist. Nashville, TN

  • John Gray in a leather jacket against a brick wall, wiping his face with a white towel.

    John Gray Pastor and speaker, John Gray. Nashville, TN

  • Kortney Wilson in a pink feather headpiece and tall brown boots, leaning against a peeling teal wall.

    Kortney Wilson Musician & TV Personality. Nashville, TN

  • The three members of The Beat Kangz in sunglasses on a gravel lot, the Nashville skyline behind them.

    The Beat Kangz Producers & Entrepreneurs

  • Union Jordan 2 sneakers and trousers covered in a projected geometric light pattern.

    Union Jordan 2 Light experiments with projectors