God I love Payton Tolle.

Willson sends that 418 FEET!!!

My very first photo of the moon! Can’t wait to experiment with this some more.

Neopets website in 2001

The question we hear most from design system teams right now is some version of: are we ready for this? This week's newsletter is about what being ready actually looks like, and why it has a lot less to do with the state of your system than you might expect. www.baselinedesign.com/posts/what-b...

Nothing is better than a long drive with Righteous Jams on repeat.

In this article, @murphytrueman.com identifies #designsystems contribution rituals that build momentum and strengthen adoption, such as office hours, credits, and design crits. 👇👇👇

Most governance models get built before anyone's asked what they're actually for. Sometimes it's a fear. Sometimes it's just a feeling that a system at this scale should have one. www.baselinedesign.com/posts/govern...

How am I expected to function as a human being when this is the team I chose to dedicate my life to?

Like an evil, amorphous blob absorbing energy, I feel like I gain untold experience from reading @murphytrueman.com.

Payton Tolle is a global treasure.

this place is like tumblr for people who work stay at home jobs

Ooh this is fun! Have Heart Guilt Trip Madball Kublai Khan State Champs H20 Neck Deep Nick Shoulders Terror Slapshot

Some days you just need to lay in your dog’s bed between meetings.

Never in my days of playing Super Mario World on the SNES did I think video games would look like Forza Horizon 6. This is INCREDIBLE.

Trace your primary brand colour through your project. It's in the tokens file, the DESIGN.md, the AGENTS.md rule, a Figma Skill, and the Storybook manifest. Same decision. Five surfaces. None auto-derived. blog.murphytrueman.com/your-design-...

"Teams that take #designsystems best practices seriously treat documentation as infrastructure, not a launch deliverable you forget about." In this post, @murphytrueman.com explores why docs often become a bottleneck and how to build maintenance into the workflow. Read it on @zeroheight.com:

I've started calling it design system archaeology. The work of reading a system you didn't build. You want to rebuild it. Don't. The mess is usually context you don't have. Yet. blog.murphytrueman.com/design-syste...

What's better than one steal?

🚨🚨🚨 New post! blog.murphytrueman.com/agents-are-t...

New post! blog.murphytrueman.com/what-your-co...

🎶 It's the most wonderful tiiiiime of the yeaaaar

New article! blog.murphytrueman.com/the-prompt-y... #designsystems

The 5th edition of the Design Systems Report is here 📔 Design systems are now critical infrastructure—but they’re getting harder to sustain. Buy-in is dropping. Teams are stretched. Adoption is still the biggest challenge. Explore the report → hubs.li/Q04774jK0

Calling a component Modal instead of Dialog feels like a stylistic preference. But the consequences are more technical than that. I've completed a full breakdown of four open-source systems and what their implementations reveal 👇 blog.murphytrueman.com/in-the-open-...

AI tooling for design systems has matured. The operational work hasn't kept up. Token audits. Deprecation plans. Drift detection. Stakeholder briefs. I tidied up the Claude Code skills I've used for that work, and put them somewhere public. designsystemops.com

Sometimes all it takes is someone caring enough to say something. I'm glad to be off Substack. Loving my experience with @ghost.org so far.

❤️❤️

This is the kind of game that reminds you why baseball is the best sport on the planet. ⚾🇰🇷🇯🇵

Highly recommend reaching out to @oliverlindberg.com! Working with him and the @zeroheight.com team is a tonne of fun. 💌

New article on the blog! 📚 Most design systems teams are deep in the technical work of AI readiness. Cleaner tokens, better documentation, semantic component naming. That work matters. What's less discussed is what happens when it actually works. blog.murphytrueman.com/p/your-desig...

I gave UI components D&D Challenge Ratings based on how dangerous they become when misused. The Data Table is CR 8. Legendary. It has consumed entire sprints. The summoner bears responsibility for what they've conjured. thecomponentbestiary.com

I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 most evenings this week, and somewhere between character creation and my third failed persuasion roll, I stopped thinking about the game and started thinking about design systems. blog.murphytrueman.com/p/building-f...

PRAYING my coilovers arrive this week 😩

We built Figma to solve the problem of sharing component code. It worked. Then the tooling became the deliverable and we stopped asking what it was for. Agentic tools are doing the same thing. blog.murphytrueman.com/p/were-getti...

All I want to do is work on my car 😩😩😩

New post! blog.murphytrueman.com/p/what-i-sto...

My book, Accessibility For Everyone, is now free and online as a website. accessibilityforeveryone.site The book was first published by A Book Apart in 2017 but it holds up! It covers web accessibility for designers, developers, content folks, and really everyone who works in tech.

I haven’t been able to find my kindle since we moved and it’s INCREDIBLY frustrating.

✍️ Just finished another code drawing in my AI series, this one's about MCP in practice. Enjoy!

Your design system has opinions. They’re just not being enforced. Backend teams don’t scale API quality with docs and good intentions, they scale it with validation. UI still leans on trust: guidance, reviews, and tribal knowledge. open.substack.com/pub/murphytr...

It’s wild that some people consider using precise punctuation a "red flag" for AI content. We’ve reached a truly bizarre era of literacy.

Manual governance can't scale. By the time you catch violations in quarterly audits, they're already shipped & expensive to fix. Production systems solved this with continuous monitoring and automated checks. I wrote about treating design systems like production infrastructure 👇

Most design systems assume interaction starts with a component. Conversation breaks that immediately. In my latest article, I wrote about the building blocks conversational systems actually need 👇 murphytrueman.substack.com/p/when-conve...

New post alert! #DesignSystems blog.murphytrueman.com/p/the-timing...

AI learns from your design system, generates new components, those get used, AI learns from those. Each iteration pulls your system closer to what AI thinks is "correct", smoothing away what made it yours. ✍️ On the feedback loop & monoculture risk: murphytrueman.medium.com/the-ai-feedb...

Your Tokens Have Become Infrastructure, by @murphytrueman.bsky.social: https://archive.ph/3nnSA #designtokens #designsystems

APIs shape the product experience long before UI work begins. In this article, Thinkmill designer @murphytrueman.bsky.social shares how designers can collaborate on API design using systems thinking. 👉 blog.murphytrueman.com/p/simplifyin...