Hi Reader,

This is the first note I’m sending from Design Systems Engineer.

I’ve been meaning to write publicly about design systems for a while, but I kept waiting for the industry to “settle down” a bit; better tools, clearer patterns, more consensus. At some point, I realized I was letting perfect be the enemy of useful. The tools will keep changing (and probably never be perfect), but foundational ideas about design systems and designer–developer collaboration hold up regardless of the stack or tooling.

That’s what I want to share here.

The first piece is about a failure mode I’ve seen repeatedly as systems scale:

• Design systems don’t usually break because of missing components
• They break when important design decisions stay implicit
• As teams, platforms, and automation increase, those decisions start to leak
• If a decision can’t be named, typed, or diffed, it’s hard for it to survive change

The full article goes deeper into why this happens and what it implies for how we structure design system work.

Read the full piece here:
​designsystems.engineer/writing/design-decisions-leak/​

If this resonates (or if it feels incomplete), I’d genuinely love to hear where you’ve seen this show up on your own teams. Just reply; I read everything.

More soon,
Garth