§ Design

A design system isn’t a component library. The library is the easy 20%. The system is the 80% of decisions — spacing scale, tone of voice, when NOT to use a modal — that stop five people rebuilding the same button five ways.

Accessibility isn’t a checklist you run at the end. If a keyboard user can’t reach it, it doesn’t exist — and you find that out by unplugging your mouse for an hour, not by adding aria-labels to a broken thing.

Sentence case in UI copy isn’t a style preference, it’s a reading-speed decision. Title Case Makes Every Label A Little Speed Bump. You read sentences all day; let the interface be a sentence.

Newsreader for long reading, a clean grotesk for doing. The serif slows you down in exactly the places you want to be slowed — an essay, a definition — and gets out of the way everywhere else.

Warm neutrals + a single accent is a constraint that makes a hundred later decisions for you. The moment you allow a second accent “just here”, you’ve signed up to defend that exception forever.

This, but for design tokens. One accent colour is a promise. The second one is a maintenance contract you didn’t read.

Unplugging the mouse for an hour is the single most humbling a11y exercise. I make every new designer do it in week one.

The “when NOT to use a modal” line is the whole thing. Our system doc has a page titled “stop opening modals” and it’s the most-read page we have.

test one

hello world