đź“ť Articles
Building agentic design systems: The future of AI-enhanced design
Luis explores how design systems must evolve beyond component libraries to become "agentic" systems enhanced with AI capabilities that automate routine tasks across all departments. By integrating AI into workflows for rapid prototyping, cross-platform consistency, and automated asset generation, design systems can become true enablers of speed and quality whilst preserving the collaborative culture that drives great design.
Ownership: Design Systems’ Silent Killer
Tina explores how design systems fail silently when ownership becomes ambiguous between design and engineering, leading to detachment, reimplementation, and drift. She explains that success came not from adding more documentation, but from explicitly owning the gap between design intent and engineering constraints, reducing detach rates from 40 percent to under 1 percent
Solid foundations or shaky ground? The essential role of infrastructure in design system code
Hannah examines the critical but often overlooked infrastructure work required to make design system code usable and scalable. The author shares lessons from their experience as a UI engineer, covering decisions around technology choices, package structure, versioning, CI/CD pipelines, and developer experience that determine whether a design system thrives or fails.
Your design system has opinions. They're just not being enforced
Murphy challenges the gap between design system documentation and enforcement, advocating for validation as essential infrastructure rather than optional guidance. Drawing on work by Nathan Curtis and emerging AI-driven tools, they make the case for encoding design decisions as contracts that catch errors at design-time, build-time, and runtime, turning tribal knowledge into explicit constraints that benefit both human developers and AI agents.
The next wave of design systems will be AI-driven
Yesenia reflects on persistent design system problems like sameness over cohesion, assembly over purpose, and decisions divorced from workflow, proposing that AI could address these by letting designers start with scenarios rather than components. Instead of assembling screens manually, users could describe intent and receive recommended patterns with embedded rationale, pulling designers toward strategic thinking while eliminating the gap between design tools and documentation.
đź‘€ Interesting Reads
Designing beyond the happy path in design systems
Stéphanie challenges designers to move beyond pixel-perfect mockups and anticipate real-world complexities like loading states, errors, varied content, and diverse user needs. They provide practical guidance on designing resilient components that adapt to technical constraints, flexible layouts, inclusive interactions, and different user preferences, turning design systems into tools that handle messy reality, not just ideal scenarios.
Design systems and shareable browser support
Robin explains how IKEA's design system shares its browser support configuration as an NPM package that consuming teams can import, ensuring automatic alignment with the design system's compatibility standards. One team saw their JavaScript bundle size drop by 55% simply by switching from a static es2015 target to the shared browserslist configuration.
How design systems offer creative safety for product teams
Ben explores how design systems should create creative safety rather than sameness, working with Yesenia Perez-Cruz to define the difference between healthy cohesion and problematic uniformity. He argues that clear definitions and a non-defensive posture from system teams enable product designers to innovate confidently within constraints, replacing anxiety with the clarity needed to do their best work.