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Notes on product design
Essays on design systems, design tokens, and building products that survive implementation.
Your design system has a drift problem, not a documentation problem
When Figma and code disagree, teams write more docs. But a doc is just another copy of the truth — and copies drift. The fix isn't informational. It's architectural.
More articles
AI is the third consumer of your design system
For twenty years design systems served two readers: humans and compilers. The third one — the model — can't see pixels and doesn't run CSS. It reads text, and most systems have nothing for it to read.
Naming design tokens: eight heuristics for where the three-tier model stops helping
On making spacing and radius as semantically clear as color and type — and the rules that take over when the textbook goes quiet.
One theme.json: a single source of truth for design, code, and AI
Your design language lives in three places that never agree — Figma, CSS, and now AI. A machine-readable theme.json turns them into one source every surface reads.
Clarity is conversion: why removing cognitive load is the cheapest growth lever
Every app competes for the same scarce attention. The friction you design out is the conversion you don't have to buy — a case for clean, low-effort interfaces.
Designers aren't artists: the job is the metric, not the beauty
Design is a business function judged by conversions and outcomes, not by how it looks. A case for treating beauty as a tool — welcome when it moves the number, optional when it doesn't.
Design has a bill: why every feature has to earn its cost back
A feature costs designer, developer, and QA time — real money. Before you spend a week perfecting it, ask how long it takes to pay that back, and whether shipping rough first would get you there faster.
Cross-platform design systems: share the tokens, split the components
One file trying to run iOS, Android, and web at once buckles. What's actually shared is narrow — colours and icons — while the components diverge. Design around that, not against it.
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