GET UM SCOTT!!!!!!

A nice little distraction from the current very large dumpster fire

I don't even know I missed the description on the broadcast but it's some part of Artemis II separating with a starry background behind it

LOOK AT THIS

Balancing Stability and Innovation in Design Systems - Tony Ward Some ramblings around internally innovating, while preserving external stability.

Design Systems should prioritize quality over speed because they serve as critical infrastructure. But that doesn't mean internal innovation shouldn't happen, or can't move at a faster pace.

www.tonyward.dev/articles/sta...

Without the governance piece, my experience has been that your Design System becomes less of that and more of a "shared component library dumping ground". That's my only concern, which the survey hit on as well.

All this to say, I'm with ya. And I appreciate the survey. Nice work :)

haha!

> teams want to ivory tower their way to a perfect design system

100%. Like I said, there's quite a gray area and tradeoffs with those decisions for sure. It'd be a good podcasting topic or something.

I do think you're right about investing/contributing. So long as the vision isn't lost.

Hi Ben.

It turns out that I can't type and have committed many spelling crimes. I blame caffeine. Have a good day!

I sound like an old man complaining above, and I partly am. But this survey was a good read. I'm glad they do this and I look forward to next year's survey.

It's cool to see the challenges folks are generally having when it comes to Design Systems. Turns out, many of use have the same challenges :)

Generating loads of documentation to check the "documentation checkbox" is not enough. It has to be _at least_ decent. And at a minimum useful in some way. Otherwise it's just more noise.

Additionally, people don't read anymore. That's another problem.

But anyway, I'm interested in this.

Wanting "Documentation generation" from AI is interesting to me. I'm not a fan of AI generating documentation for humans. Generating documentation for AIs, sure, have at it.

But I'm a human. Tell me what I should know and with 0 extra fluff and bs.

"“There are of course some advantages, but a lot of hype that doesn't always feel worth it... individual contributors and stakeholders seem to be on very different wavelengths due to the marketing and influencer output around vibe coding and AI tools generally.”

Hell yeah. Great quote. Agreed!

"Figma Variables to Design Token automation"

I have an article for folks! Always happy to chat as well.

www.tonyward.dev/articles/fig...

Governance is really important when it comes to this. Some teams do it well, some don't.

It's always the rigidity vs flexibility discussion. The answer is typically "it depends".

I can't help but wonder if a lot of the reason folks have issues with their Design System is because they've relaxed their standards and guidelines. They've lost "the vision" of the Design System and now it's just a hodgepodge of whatever someone needed at that point in time, for limited use cases.

There are legitimate reasons to "gatekeep" your Design System from external contributions. Early on in particular.

Every team and DS is different. Being open vs closed has tradeoffs. Like all things - there's a gray area and you have to figure out what works best for your org.

"over 2 in 5 teams are gatekeeping contributions to their design system. While trust might not be an issue on the consumption side, it suggests there might be a trust issue from the design system teams to the wider product org."

This is interesting. Not sure I'm a fan using the word "gatekeeping".

A lot of really interesting nuggets in here. I actually missed taking this survey, but I'm glad others did.

Bring Me The Horizon - Doomed (MAPHRA Vocal Cover) YouTube video by MAPHRA

Been almost a month and still listening to @maphramusic.bsky.social’s Doomed cover.

It’s so dang good.

youtu.be/r6L-GUOAhGo?...

If you fundamentally misunderstand what the design “process” is and what it’s for, no tool, not even AI, can help you.

If you’re hiring, I’m happy to connect you two!

Design System friends - I know a gal looking for a new role. She's senior+ with 8+ years of Design System experience. Does great work.

What's My JND? Find your Just Noticeable Difference in colour perception. How small a colour difference can you actually see?

What's My JND? 0.0026
Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd...

This was a lot of fun!

Yeah, that lines up with my thinking.

0 context from me of course, but for a quick thought experiment: if you're already doing that, does it make sense to bake the text into the spinner anyway? Maybe provide a hide-label/hide-text to spinner for cases where no *visual* text is needed/required?

Yeah, we do what you described at the end.

It's arguably not ideal, but it solves the cross shadow root issues. And consumers don't have to think about it. Just give our component(s) a string and we'll handle the a11y for you.

Make custom elements behave with scoped registries  |  Blog  |  Chrome for Developers You can now encapsulate custom elements.

🎉 I'm so excited that scoped custom element registries is landing in Chrome and Edge! 🥳

This solves one of the biggest complaints with the web components APIs: the global tag name namespace.

Standards is a long game though: I first proposed this in 2017! 😲

developer.chrome.com/blog/scoped-...

Dude. Hell yeah!

Love content like this, Manuel. Keep it coming!

Block was a really great place to work for the past four months. Unfortunately, I’m part of today’s 40% layoff.

If you need an old hand at web stuff, who has staff software engineering experience at multiple international corporations, hit me up. ❤️

God-tier indeed