How to supercharge your design system with slots
Five field-tested tips from early Figma users to help you unlock more freedom without giving up control.
Category: Design Systems
All CategoriesExpose your design system to LLMs
LLMs drift, fabricate tokens, and start every session from scratch. Here’s how to feed your design system to AI coding agents so they stop guessing.
Design systems checklist
A step-by-step checklist for building design systems.
Turn your Figma design system into UI screens instantlySponsored
Sync with UX Pilot AI to import unlimited components and generate screens in seconds. Join 600,000+ pros iterating faster. Free to try!
Design systems are today’s cure and tomorrow’s cause of shitty software
Design systems have been propping up quality from collapsing. And in doing so, risk making the collapse even more spectacular.
Your design system needs an enforcer
Although design systems promise consistency, most still fail without someone actively enforcing the rules and making teams follow them.
Is there too much design in design systems?
Most design system roles are design-focused, but the biggest value comes from code. Are we building design systems, or just designing them?
Why federated design systems keep failing
Where they broke down, and why centralized models usually work better.
Public design systems are worth it
It’s incredibly valuable to make a design system available to all–no matter what the bean-counters say.
Generating utility classes from design tokens using style dictionary
Seamless design-to-development workflows and collaboration, including snowflakes.
Designing Design Systems BookSponsored
Everything you need to know about design systems in one place.
Systems, stables and stars
Why mature organizations still rely on rockstars for critical work, and how systems raise the floor while stars raise the ceiling.
Figma plugin: Figmentation
Automate the process of extracting design tokens directly from your Figma components — including colors, typography, spacing, borders, and effects.
Design attractors
Hot take: the design system specialist role will eventually disappear.
Complex systems emerge from iterations on simple designs
Whenever you find a complex system working in nature, it’s usually the output of a very simple system or thing that was iterated over and over.
Why you should care about design context
By thoughtfully organizing your work, you can help your developer counterparts build more efficiently and accurately.
A new (or rather, old) approach to typography on the web
Typography serves language, not the convenience of a system.
The missing link to make your Design Systems shineSponsored
The only design platform with native Design Tokens just got even stronger: Penpot now adds Variants to help you manage your design systems.
Embracing design dialects
How design systems can evolve into living languages, embracing dialects for flexibility and improved user experiences.
Where AI is failing design systems, and where we are failing AI
How much instability, lack of quality, or impermanence can we tolerate in our tools?