Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

Now we're in the business of creating context for AI (ew), what is actually important when we're creating documentation that will be used by machines AND humans? Are detailed component guidelines important? Are the foundations essential to get right? Or can we rely on top-level patterns and vague guidance?

Show notes

• How LLMs use MCPs to read your design system and how to write prompts that work with that
• Product Deep Dive Webinar: MCP, vibe coding, and your design system
• PDF of A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al.
• Google Prompting Essentials course on Coursera
• Marketing Against the Grain podcast
• AI and Design Systems course with Brad Frost, Ian Frost and TJ Pitre
• TJ Pitre on LinkedIn
• Dom Nguyen on LinkedIn
• Sil Bormüller on LinkedIn

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

Design systems kill creativity, right? We've heard that said so many times. But are we actually taking the time to inject joy into the system itself? Not only considering it as a part of the process for what we include in the system, but also in how we do documentation, release notes, and general communication around the design system? Or controversially... is it even important?

Show notes

• Luke’s article on delighting in design systems
• Societe Generale release notes article
• Aaron Walter’s Heirarchy of User Needs
• The socks component in Gitlab’s Pyjamas design system

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

Set the scene - you've joined a new company as a product designer or engineer, and you're confronted with a massive system, with custom naming and opaque decisions. Queue anxiety. So how do we make our design systems easy to understand, and make them a strength for onboarding new joiners?

Show notes

• Amy’s talk about jargon
• zh’s AI features

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

It's time to peer into the crystal ball and predict what's coming up for design systems this year and further out. Will AI take all our jobs? Are design systems becoming a thing of the past? Will we finally kill all creativity? Or are we still plodding along to general adoption?

Show notes

• No show notes this episode!

Design system folks seem to be prone to burnout, arguments, and generally feeling underappreciated within their organizations. What makes design systems folks so prone to being loaded with additional weight? We discuss why this happens, as well as some strategies to overcome it.

Show Notes

• Amy Hupe – "Burn baby burnout" (based on her Converge Manchester 2023 talk): https://amyhupe.co.uk/articles/burn-baby-burnout/
• Lauren LoPrete – "Design Systems Burnout" talk at Clarity 2021: https://www.clarityconf.com/session/design-systems-burnout
• Robin Rendle – "Design Systems Burnout" newsletter: https://robinrendle.com/the-cascade/012-design-systems-burnout/

Brad Frost - “Master design systems governance with this one weird trick: bradfrost.com/blog/post/master-design-system-governance-with-this-one-weird-trick/

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

Time to get spicy... One of the big promises of the hype of design systems was that it would reduce organizational and product complexity by providing efficient, replicable ways of doing things. Now that we've bedded in, its time to ask - how much do design systems actually reduce complexity? Do they just reorganize and make complexity more palatable?

Show notes

• Product Deep Dive on Systematizing your Documentation
• Michelle’s article on structuring your design systems

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

A bit of a deep topic this week – how important is consistency as a concept to be aiming for with design systems? Obviously, it's one of our design systems' selling points, but in a world where we're moving more and more towards browserless, how important is component consistency, or can we see a place where foundational consistency is all we need?

Show notes

• A List Apart - Design Dialects: Breaking the rules, not the system
• Vinted - Greenhouse

Season 2 Episode 1

Design Systems WTF is the fortnightly podcast where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with Q&A from the live audience.

We took a few months off and y'all went and changed everything... We dive into the wonderful world of contextual design systems. Do MCPs finally offer what we need to make our design systems serve information up contextually? Are there major things we need to refactor? Or is it all smoke and mirrors?

Show notes: 

• Knowledge graphs article from Chase
• Luke’s talk on Contextual Documentation
• Converge videos
• DS Live with TJ Pitre
• TJ Pitre on LinkedIn

Selling the value of your design system to folks who don't necessarily understand it is a difficult and thankless task. But are we trying to sell in the right things? Is it possible to put the value of our design system against the bottom line, and how far down the stack can we go? Can we actually put a dollar sign against a single component?

The age old question – should designers know how to code? Or more specifically, how much should designer know when it comes to code? Considering it's the medium that we're designing for, it's still surprising how much this topic splits opinion. Luke and special guest Rob Whitfield will dive into the pros and cons, and give some practical advice if you did want to delve into the witchcraft that engineers do.