Your design system just acquired a new type of user: one that reads JSON and markdown files, and doesn't care about good storytelling. I build for both audiences. Token architecture, libraries, docs, and the unglamorous glue between them, like governance and enablement practices.
Frame the problem, build it in code, deliver, test, repeat. The "new" ways of working mean less time waiting between steps, more time solving the actual problem. And I love it!
I build the tooling myself: agents that help with day-to-day design-system usage, skills that speed up processes, documentation optimised so machines can actually build well from it. Some of it works great. Some of it still needs figuring out.
Here are a few highlights from my recent work. For more details,
feel free to
contact me.
Writing
carefully
honestly about design systems
and AI in
Design Systems Unfiltered.
Creating my first command and skill, and starting to learn when AI actually helps in my day to day.
A reflection on a design system experiment, silent feedback, and what I’d do differently today with AI.
Step one: let AI do the repetitive work, but not blindly. How I turned our documentation checklist into a skill.
As part of the team, I build and maintain systems and workflows tailored to specific needs, and help people use them.
We can collaborate on a project basis: an audit, governance, or untangling a system that's outgrown itself.
👻
Good design system work is often invisible. If people can focus on the actual problem instead of fighting the tool, that's success, not how polished the file looks.
🤖
AI should take the boring work off your plate: audits, first drafts, repetitive tasks. But the human touch still matters. Some things can be accelerated, not fully replaced.
📡
Tokens and docs used to onboard designers. Now they also feed AI tools, which improvise (badly) when the source is ambiguous. If your system isn't readable by machines, there's no magic command that will make it build with quality.
🔗
Design and code have often told different stories. But it's never been easier to make them tell the same one. The answer isn't choosing one over the other, but (re)creating the conditions for them to evolve together.
Hey, I'm Érica. I've been in design for 15+ years and somewhere along the way became the person who figures out how to make design systems survive contact with real teams and real problems.
I write about what I learn as I go: the wins, the awkward moments, the “well, that didn’t work” parts, at Design Systems Unfiltered. No BS.
Remote-first, AI-curious, and always looking for ways to make complex work a little simpler.
