Historically I don’t keep up with Figma Config, but this year the algorithm suggested a couple of videos that piqued my interest.
Dense by Design subverted my expectations by incorporating two talks in one. The speaker walks you through his journey of grappling with a difficult question: Why can’t the Stripe dashboard design look more like the Bloomberg terminal? He takes you on a tour of interesting examples of dense design. You begin to understand the motivation behind density and how fundamental design principles can make dense things easier to parse. Some interfaces are informative and rich for some, and baffling to others.
Towards the end of the talk, the speaker branches off from the subject and drops a powerful quote:
A user experience is a portion of someone’s life that they’re never getting back
This resonated with me. In e-commerce, it’s common for products to steal your attention. They may hijack your task by showing pop ups, or stop you in your tracks to shake you down for your email and password. These patterns continue largely due to survivor-ship bias. It’s easier to observe increased newsletter sign ups and logins than to measure impacts to brand reputation and repeat visitor rate.
If we stopped to consider the gravity of these choices: Your popup has wasted someone’s time on earth. Would we still be inclined to build it? Motivations of capital can blind us to what really matters.
In the beginning of 2026, I was invited to a design system workshop. As an outsider working with product partners, I often receive designs that deviate from the system. These deviations usually violate accessibility guidelines, incur a higher level of effort for engineering, and are shown to me in a hand-off process. This process (perhaps by design) makes it challenging to collaborate with a designer to refine a design. You have two weeks to reach alignment between engineering, design and product. Often compromises are made and everyone loses to some degree.
I came to the Design System workshop with a iron-clad opinion that the Design System team should enforce the system and stop giving product designers suggestions. Designers usually disregard suggestions and I’m stuck building something bespoke and risking the deadline. This recommendation seemed obvious to me. Why would a design system be so lenient on their guidelines?
Design Systems Anarchy challenged my opinion on Design Systems. The speaker showed how great art comes from spaces and venues with simple rules and freedom of expression. Her background in DIY scenes taught her that innovation comes from painting outside the lines of strong and trusted foundations.
Control is at odds with innovation.
Building a strong design system is more complex than I thought. You won’t get far being a Design System cop. Building trust the people who use your system is a complex process. My opinion on enforcement has been flipped on its head, and it’s not quite clear what the exact alternative steps should be. Systems are organic and evolve based on the conditions around it. An “ideal” world where everyone follows the rules probably isn’t a world I want to live in.