Design System Office Hours

Davy and PJ dive into the future of design tokens, exploring how to "tokenize everything" from complex color transformations (OKLCH) to utility tokens for motion and content strings.

Davy and PJ discuss why the future of design workflow isn't just better handoff—it’s starting with the code itself.

Davy and PJ discuss the "liability" of stale documentation and why AI still needs human oversight. They explore using Figma’s API to automate visual updates and kill the "pain in the butt" of manual maintenance.

Building vs. Inheriting: Davy and PJ discuss the performance cost of design system dependencies. Learn how to choose the right framework without bloating your system or losing control of your architecture.

Davy and PJ celebrate four years of Design System Office Hours by looking ahead at the shifting landscape of 2026. They explore how interoperability, open-source tooling, and AI-driven documentation being major themes to uplevel design system practices.

Davy and PJ tackle the notorious difficulty of naming in design systems, advocating for human-readable, descriptive language over "cute" metaphors and discussing how AI is making file cleanliness more critical than ever.

Davy and PJ discuss a potential trend of major design systems going from public to internal only, stressing that public documentation is the ultimate forcing function for quality and a huge win for the community.

Davy and PJ talk about the term "craft," emphasizing that high-quality design work requires designers to understand engineering constraints and that a good design system needs to provide education, not just components and prototypes.

Davy talks to PJ about his trip to see Figma's slots conference, formerly known as Schema. We talk about the releases and rejoice on a focus on the main editor again.

Davy talks to friend of the program, Ben Callahan from Sparkbox about his series The Question, which brings together design system designers bi-weekly to share and learn collaboratively in a 60-min workshop.