I'd be more interested in learning about the impact working remotely vs. in person can have on the influence a designer can have on a team or within an organization.

You need people leading the project who understand the value of a design system. This sometimes isn't the case.

IBM :)

We took some accessibility training here recently at IBM. The trainer was blind, and was bouncing around from site to site using a screen reader. When he landed on IBM's site, the screen reader started reading the large hero image, but was shortly cut off by some massive full screen modal. Mid sentence it started to pick up what was in the modal. He didn't realize that he was even in a modal until I told him. It wasn't until then I realized how disruptive and inaccessible they could be (on our own damn site, no less).

Thanks, I managed to resolve the issue by disabling other plugins that I guess were messing up the Zeplin.

I agree, it's taking up quite a bit of horizontal space itself. Different placement/visual treatment could help.

I love the icon/illustration style! They're really vibrant and have a lot of energy to them.

My biggest issue is with how work is being displayed. It's too tiny and feels crammed onto the homepage. Give the work some space to breath. Put it on it's own page and really allow each project to shine.

You mean outside of the giant X to the far right?

While I agree there are some hierarchy issues (the smaller sizes address this, making search the clear priority) I disagree with some of your other points.

The page to me doesn’t feel too crowded at all, and I’m viewing it on a 13” macbook. There is a search to the left, and image to the right with a headline peaking from below indicating scroll to read more. It feels clean and rather simple what my options are here.

The URLs are not pointless, their URLs are very tidy. You can easily see if a link is taking you to news, an alumni page, the library site, etc. It potentially obscuring the link is really a non-issue, move your mouse.

The top nav disappearing could be problematic, but it seems they’ve done a good job ensuring most pages aren’t very long so maybe they found it unnecessary?

Your last two points are fair, though I assumed “Join us in in building a better world” had to do with their community involvement/volunteering efforts, which was correct. I could see including that on the homepage a client demand and them doing the best they could with the real estate provided.