Design
I run design for a small set of tools I also build. This desk exists to show the middle of that work, not the end of it: the options I considered, the ones I threw away, and the point where a constraint I did not expect changed the answer.
Three things live here.
The ten-family system
The app portfolio is built from ten design families. Each one fixes a layout, a palette, a type pair, a density, a surface strategy and a radius, and every app inherits one. The interesting part is not the families; it is the governance around them, and what happened the first time the system met a hard accessibility rule.
Where the system was wrong
Seven of the ten family palettes do not clear WCAG 2.2 AA on their own muted and accent colours. I found that by computing every pair rather than eyeballing it, and the fix was a token split rather than a repaint. This is the piece with the ugly middle left in.
Two toolchain flows
Not written yet. The toolchain has no shipped UI to trace, and I will not write a process story about screens that do not exist.
Where to find the work
Two of the apps behind this desk are live now:
- figmini, a small design surface
- UX insight hub, references for common UX research concepts and methods
Journey, Persona and Contrast are not live yet, so they are not linked. When they are, they will be.