Design systems writing from the last 30 days, newest first. Dedicated blogs come in whole; general feeds only when a post is about design systems.
👋 Get weekly insights, tools, and templates to help you build and scale design systems. More: Design Tokens Mastery Course / AI Design Guide / My Linkedin · Presenting new partner of the newsletter, QT Group. They are…
Design systems built on cylindrical hsl(h, s, l) math consistently run into the same perceptual flaw:...
What my Fresh Basket UX case study made me think about designing interfaces that know what deserves attention. A dashboard can follow every design-system rule and still feel exhausting. The spacing is consistent…
When everyone has a say in how a brand looks and behaves digitally, who is responsible for ensuring it remains one brand? Photo by Brands&People on UnsplashThere is a strange contradiction in how large organisations…
Great engineering and design practices beat complex agent harnesses. What a benchmark run against a real component library actually measured. Cover image generated with MidjourneyOriginally posted on Southleft’s blog · A…
A practical approach to enforcing design tokens, protecting module boundaries, and testing custom rules without turning CI into a source of false positives. Design systems usually start with good intentions: semantic…
Architecture or Folklore? A practical roadmap for making enterprise design systems machine-readable · AI can generate user interfaces remarkably fast. That doesn’t mean it understands your product. A design system that…
What we publish, what we look for and what happens after you submit. Design Systems Collective publishes writing about building, running and working with design systems. Anyone who follows the publication on Medium can…
How to define ownership, approval tiers, and component-level accountability without turning governance into bureaucracy. A scalable design system needs a clearly defined governance model. It must establish who owns the…
On 29 September I opened a small task in my own design system: make the outline Button’s border pass WCAG 1.4.11, the 3:1 contrast rule for the boundaries of controls. The number was not close. Against the page, the…
Your design system can help the Figma agent understand the principles and guidelines that define your product. Here’s how to make that context useful to the agent.
At Config India on October 15, 2026, Figma moved code layers into open beta and launched Specs, a Markdown format that both people and AI…
The best design system examples do more than show you what buttons, forms, and navigation should look like. They show how experienced product teams make recurring design and engineering decisions once, document them, and…
Registration crosses, notched tags, tally marks and a rubber stamp, specified in docs/brand.md with a rule each, implemented in 228 lines, and countable in the HTML of the live pages.
A six-month field report on W3C tokens, MCP servers, and surviving the 861% code-churn wave.
Design system series, part 4. Two lessons on writing the color roles into Figma, a repository, and the rules page.
Over the years, I’ve worked with team leaders who want to test a design system by using it to build the design system documentation site. This is the act of dogfooding: using your own product or services. It’s practicing…
I used to treat Figma as the source of truth for design tokens. Update the color, publish the...
In design, we love spending hours obsessing over consistency, grids, and alignment. But when I heard that the native CSS random() function landed in Safari and is rolling out in Chrome 156, I started wondering: where…
In this conversation, Anna E. Cook and I talk about what happens when the work that defines you stops being the work you're hired to do. Anna traces the systemic forces pushing accessibility specialists out of their…
At Moneybox, I built our custom icon library alongside the foundations of the design system. Working with icons gives you plenty of opportunities to see how a component can be laid out correctly and still look a bit off…
What changes in a design team’s work when its rules are read by a machine
Read the original article on the DS-GN blog. DS-GN — pronounced "design" — builds UI components and...
I was having a conversation with my wife the other week. She was in the middle of a token naming exercise. And her issue was that she had a primitive token named heading-xl and was trying to figure out what the semantic…
A practical approach to governing tokens, components, exceptions, and releases across mobile products.
Developing Taste · Simply shipping a product that works is no longer enough, everyone can do that, especially now with AI. It’s not the differentiator anymore as people expect things to work. What makes a product stand…
👋 Get weekly insights, tools, and templates to help you build and scale design systems. More: Design Tokens Mastery Course / AI Design Guide / My Linkedin · Do you already have components like “approval prompt” or “tool…
You don’t need months of planning or hundreds of components.
Why the traditional centralized vs. federated debate misses the point — and how a new approach solves the innovation-consistency paradox
It's the season 5 finale and we're going whimsical, when Natalya Shelburne joins us to talk about the psychology of creativity. She makes a case for why creativity is not a personality trait, but a muscle most of us were…
We spent years treating design tokens as an engineering afterthought. Native variables finally forced us to think in systems.
An AI coding agent can use the right design system components and still use them incorrectly. A form control has no label. An icon name looks right but isn't in the library. A spacing token looks reasonable but doesn't…
Most design system release notes I read say what changed. A new component, a new variant, a fixed focus ring. They rarely say how anyone…
In April 2025 we introduced NuvoUI, an SCSS framework built around readable class names and an...
Design system series, part 3. Two lessons on turning one chosen color into every shade a screen needs.
Mine was. Not deliberately — nobody sat down to write something false. But the documentation said a...
When we start working with a new organization on a design system, there’s a lot we don’t know. We need to understand the organization, the product, and the team.
As organizations expand their digital products, maintaining a consistent experience across platforms becomes increasingly difficult…
👋 Get weekly insights, tools, and templates to help you build and scale design systems. More: Design Tokens Mastery Course / AI Design Guide / My Linkedin · Let’s kick off this post with a quick exercise. Open any SaaS…
It may sound strange, but some (or a lot of) people don’t have a surname. My name is Widianto and I fall into the same category.
Retiring roughly forty hand-rolled UI component variants into a shared design system across an internal ops platform — tokens, a lint rule that proves it can fail, and the two production outages the migration itself…
I spent nine years at Spotify leading design systems and accessibility. During that time, I learned as much from what failed as from what succeeded. I’m sharing these insights not to critique decisions made at the time…
Every engineer knows the deal with technical debt. You take a shortcut to ship something today, and you pay for it later. The interest compounds quietly until one day a simple change takes a week, and nobody remembers…
A look at design systems as structures for recurring decisions, and the problems and costs involved in token hierarchies, component APIs, visual changes, adoption, and operations.
A design system is what it does · What I’m interested in here is what the ergonomics of each system drives you towards: what kinds of experiences you design and what kinds of users you center. What I’m proposing is that…
TL;DR? Jump to demo · I’ve always had a soft spot for icons1. Not only do they add polish to a UI, they can also tangibly improve usability. Familiar icons help users find what they need quickly, since we recognize…
Every design token talk follows the same script. Primitives, semantics, done. The speaker shows a clean diagram. The audience nods…
You're guaranteed to catch the Love Bug, when Dave House joins us to talk about his love of old Volkswagens. He shares how owning and restoring old air-cooled VWs filled a gap left when music stopped being his primary…
🕰️ Ten Minute Focus · The feed I produce myself — On working with agents, producing more than ever, and losing the ability to see anything whole. Maestro, we have six more deliveries ready — Created by the author with…
Knowing what work to hand to an agent is a skill of its own. This workflow shows how a designer shapes a new temporary-access feature while the Figma agent handles the library updates, crit feedback, and a first draft of…
Figma’s agent can take on repetitive work across your design system, from maintaining your library to automating how designs adhere to it. Here, we share a few ways to put the Figma agent to work.
Naming is hard. The language we use shapes the way we think about things, but also the conversation we have about it. That’s why we have so much confusion about colors, icons, UI components, features — and that’s why we…
👉🏻 Curated weekly UX Research, Design & Tech resources: building a general-purpose accessibility agent, how to make your design system AI-ready, WCAG 3.3.4 error prevention explained, why you got faster but your…
The Default Is Not a Design Decision · Software used to look like a great many different things, and that difference carried information. Back when interfaces didn’t resemble each other, a product’s visual language said…
Design systems can power more than just designs. This workflow shows you how to turn raw materials into brand campaign collateral using the Gen Effect and Figma nodes.
The US Web Design System is about to get a radical overhaul. We don't know yet what that overhaul is going to entail, but I think there's a decent chance that it's going to involve a move to shadcn/ui from vanilla…
Code as the Source of Truth · But now, with AI tooling, code being the source of truth makes it easier than ever for design and engineering to be a REAL, single team. More folks are starting to become “design engineers”…