emeninIt stands for Érica Menin, not the Eminem you thought ;)

Érica Menin Staff Design Systems Designer

Design systems,
and what comes next.

After years of building and maintaining design systems, I’m exploring what changes when AI starts using them too. Here’s some of the work behind those questions, and what I’m looking into now.

What I’m exploring Get in touch

Based in Germany · Working remotely

Rebuild with

Selected work

Examples from my design systems work: aligning component behavior across platforms, updating system foundations, documenting decisions, and guiding teams through library changes.

What I’m exploring

A few thoughts I keep coming back to as I read, experiment, and work with design systems and AI. Here’s where I stand so far.

Subject to change… things move SO fast.

Tokens give values. Component properties give options. Neither explains when to use something or why an exception exists. That lives in documentation and component contracts: expected behavior, allowed combinations, accessibility requirements. The more explicit those are, the better the agent gets. Then the real question is whether it actually applies them.

AI + Design SystemsA design system built only for people is easy for AI to get wrong.

Writing

Writing polished unfiltered about design systems and AI.

Don’t make your design system AI-ready yet

A starting point for improving how AI works with an existing system, without beginning with a complete rebuild.

Read on Substack

AI is shipping UI faster than your design system can protect it

Repeated primary buttons, competing colors, and the wrong default background. What those examples revealed about decisions missing from the documentation.

Read on Substack

I turned my biggest design system headache into my first Cursor command

The process of creating a first command and skill, and figuring out where AI could help with day-to-day design systems work.

Read on Substack
More on Substack ↗

A little about me

I’ve been in design for 15+ years and somewhere along the way became the person who gets excited about taking messy, complex things and making them work.

For a long time, that’s meant design systems, where I found my passion.

Now that AI is in the picture, there’s a whole new set of questions to work through. I’m exploring them here and writing about the wins, the awkward moments, and the “well, that didn’t work” parts at Design Systems Unfiltered.

Brazilian, based in Germany, remote-first.

Let’s compare notes

Have a design system that no longer quite agrees with itself? Let’s talk!

I’m open to staff-level design systems roles and freelance projects.

Find me on LinkedIn ↗

Based in Germany · Working remotely

A few answers, via terminal

Type a command or choose one below.

A few answers, via terminal

Type a command or choose one below.

↑ ↓ choose · Enter run · Esc close