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...

🎉 Happy article day! My latest post explores the control paradox in design systems open.substack.com/pub/murphytr...

The world feels awfully empty once baseball season ends.

Figma’s Schema 2025 quietly set the stage for something big – design systems that talk back. The groundwork for bidirectional systems: ones that learn from code instead of just dictating to it. 👉 Check out the my latest article: open.substack.com/pub/murphytr... #DesignSystems

Like any other product, design systems need testing and iteration. Our Design System Audit help your team see whether your system is accelerating delivery, or quietly slowing it down. 💡 Find out more: www.thinkmill.com.au/services/des... #DesignSystems

If changing a token feels scary, you’ve already built infrastructure. My latest post breaks down what that means – and how to make it safe again. Your tokens have become infrastructure → open.substack.com/pub/murphytr...

Accessibility problems are often system problems. Fixing them means understanding where they start – in patterns, components, and process. This is how we help teams make accessibility scale at @thinkmill.com.au If that’s what you’re aiming for, let’s talk about how to get there 🫶

Design tokens promised to simplify design systems, but for many teams, they've become the biggest source of complexity instead. Check out "When design tokens become technical debt" by @murphytrueman.bsky.social, now on the @zeroheight.com blog: zeroheight.com/blog/when-de...

Design tokens promised to simplify your design system. For many teams, they've become the biggest source of complexity instead. Check out my latest piece for @zeroheight.com on how this happens, and what you can do about it: zeroheight.com/blog/when-de...

Things are really starting to come together 🥹

The teams with highest adoption rates aren't necessarily building the best components. They're building the clearest processes for collaboration. 🔗 I explored this idea further in my latest article: open.substack.com/pub/murphytr...

Praying for good weather so I can work on my car over the weekend 😩 I’m dying for some garage time.

Most systems start with components. The strategic ones grow into infrastructure. My latest article explores the shift toward systems that actually scale product decisions, not just pixels. 👇 Check it out below: open.substack.com/pub/murphytr...

Some of the most useful early conversations I’ve had on projects came from something deceptively simple: mapping out the app’s routes, together. No wireframes. No flows. Just: what are the pages, and what happens on them? It’s a simple move that sets the tone for everything that follows.

Some of the best product calls I’ve ever made started with something someone almost didn’t say. Design ethnography helps you notice the stuff that matters, but hides in plain sight. Great write-up from the team at @thinkmill.com.au 💡

AI isn’t just in your toolbox, it’s in the org chart. Designers aren’t being replaced, but the role is getting rewritten in real time. This is what I’m seeing from inside the work. open.substack.com/pub/murphytr... #Design #AI #Product

One thing I love about working at @thinkmill.com.au is that frameworks like DACI aren’t just theory – we actually use them, tweak them and make them part of how we move fast and thoughtfully. Shoutout to the team for continuing to turn complex challenges into repeatable practices 🫶

Rebuilding a 180SX taught me more about design, legacy, and systems than I expected. 🛠 New post: open.substack.com/pub/murphytr...

A great example of the kind of work we love at @thinkmill.com.au – long-term, cross-functional, and collaborative. Design systems, infra, and team support with AnywhereWorks. 👉 Read the full case study here: thinkmill.com.au/work/anywher...

AI doesn’t fix your design system – it reflects it. With Figma’s MCP server, structure is the interface. If your system’s messy, your output will be too. 👇 Read: The hidden cost of design system entropy open.substack.com/pub/murphytr...

Your next design system user won’t be human. Agents are already interpreting components and assembling UIs like your system is an API. ❌ Ambiguous names ❌ Visual-only intent ❌ Undocumented conventions Structure scales. Vibes don’t. 🧠 Read → open.substack.com/pub/murphytr... #designsystems #ai

Me hitting publish on another silly, little blog post, and hoping the algorithm will put it in front of the right people.