New writing on design systems from blogs, newsletters and publications: tokens, components, accessibility, documentation, design ops and more. Newest first, from the last 30 days.
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Colour choices that feel obvious from a brand or category perspective don’t always hold up against how an individual actually perceives colour. I learned this by working with a founder on a technical product. Research in…
I’ve written about my skills collection before. It started as a way to make the things I kept saying about interfaces available to an AI agent whilst I was working. The collection has grown since then, and it now has a…
Debate the source of truth for design systems, and you’ll notice that engineers answer fast. The codebase. To them, it was settled years ago: The system is whatever the code says, because the code is what runs. We…
The numbers say agents are already working inside your library. The question is whether anything in it was written for them.
🕰️ Ten Minute Focus · After the AI bubble: a manifesto — The manifesto argues that the current artificial intelligence bubble prioritises speculative economic returns over human freedom, urging a shift towards more…
If you've built white-label apps, tenant-branded apps or even just a SwiftUI rewrite of a UIKit app,...
How reusable components help designers move beyond repeated decisions and create more consistent products. The problem isn’t always a lack of components · When designers talk about design systems, the conversation…
Part 2 of 5: why “600” meant something different in every colour, and how one lightness curve fixed all nine at once. Want to skip straight to a tested palette? Try Palette Proof, the free tool I built from these tests →…
I built an AI agent to make pages within the rules. Surprisingly, it also became one more of our design system’s QA engineers. Over the past year or so, I’ve pointed a lot of AI tools at a lot of web pages. Give one a…
Why documenting the intent behind an action matters as much as documenting the reusable button itself.
Why the design tokens became a package the day a second surface copied them, what a platform-free token package may not contain, and the measurement that shows the website still keeps its own copy of 15 of the same…
Writing as a thinking tool · A model optimizing next-token probability cannot do your thinking. If you trust it to hold the pen, no thinking would get done. As everyone turns their thinking down and becomes a meat-proxy…
Six designers explored freely in code. Then a harness turned what they found into a system, and keeps it from drifting back.
👋 Get weekly insights, tools, and templates to help you build and scale design systems. More: Design Tokens Mastery Course / AI Design Guide / My LinkedIn · Claude Opus 5.5. has been my favourite model since day one. I…
“There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’, but there’s an ‘I’ in ‘meat pie’, and meat is an anagram of team.” · In Shaun of the Dead, the protagonist has a tricky time leading his friends and family against a horde of bloodthirsty…
Most teams build a design system, call it DesignOps, and then spend two years paying for the gap between the library and the codebase.
A practical approach to protecting primitive and semantic tokens while allowing controlled, component-specific changes by developers and AI agents. An AI agent is tasked with making a button slightly different. The agent…
The requests reaching my design system are for panels and charts. The questions behind them are product questions. Open a side panel on a reporting screen, then change the date range in the main view. Does the panel…
I’ve been away on holiday, so weekly links took a little break too. I’m back now, and here’s this week’s reading. 🕰️ Ten Minute Focus · Safari will ’dark mode’ your site for you — Safari 27.3 beta introduces an opt-in…
I recently saw this post by Karolina Szczur speaking on “design systems”, the name of the practice we take on. I’ve seen the debate before, and largely avoided thinking about it because my branding skills have room for…
If you’ve been working in product design for a few years, you’ve probably heard this advice countless times: “Design everything on an 8pt grid.” · This recommendation has been repeated so often that, for many designers…
I shipped a design system five ways and nobody picked any of them. Two lessons from that failure shaped how 7onic was built.
What changes when the most frequent user of your design system can’t see it.
Daniele Rossi is a Toronto-based cartoonist, digital accessibility specialist, and workshop facilitator who stutters, or stammers. His comic strip Franky Banky follows the adventures of Franky, a fox who stutters, and is…
A marketing content system gives your team a reliable way to create, organize, update, and publish...
📝 Articles · Linting Your Design Tokens - The Where And The When · In my article, I outline the importance of implementing linting for design tokens to ensure consistency and maintainability within design systems. I…
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…
Slab Elements · Slab handles the hard parts of a component — keyboard and focus, ARIA, forms, events — on top of the native elements browsers already ship. What it looks like? That’s all you, in React, Vue, Svelte…
I used to paste half the design system into the agent prompt “just so it knows our Button.” The reply...
If you've spent your career in design, you're probably used to working on a canvas. Most projects have a visual form: objects you can select, layers you can rearrange, and elements you can watch change as you work on…
What Figma’s MCP server needs from your tokens, names and components.
Design system series, part 5. Three lessons on a checker, the changeover, and the human check before release
How to standardize Figma token names, catch duplicated color codes, and spot off-grid spacing for $0 before developer handoff.
No More Icons In Every Menu By Default · They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do…
👋 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…
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.
On 29 September I opened a small task in my own design system: make the outline Button’s border pass WCAG 1.4.11,
A six-month field report on W3C tokens, MCP servers, and surviving the 861% code-churn wave.
924 Gilman Street, an all-ages punk venue in Berkeley, California, is over four decades old — a run that’s outlasted most of the clubs it grew up alongside. It has real rules, stenciled at the entryway: no racism, no…
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…
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
When we think about design systems today, we think about components that mirror each other in pixels and code. We package these up and hand them off to product teams to build their software, often paired with…
At zeroheight, we spend a lot of time telling folks that their design system should be the context coding agents work from. However, the obvious follow-up from anyone who hears that is a question we didn’t have a good…
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…
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…
AI is changing how design system teams create documentation. MCPs have made it possible for an agent to inspect the anatomy and variants of a new component in Figma, then generate useful documentation in Markdown. We can…
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…
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…
There’s a classic thought experiment that asks, “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around, does it make a sound?” I like to relate this to design systems. If you create the greatest design system, but there’s no…
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.
It's on my list. If it's junk, it's gone in the next hourly refresh after I block it.