Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

With the release of Figma Motion, we finally have a tool that talks to our design systems that do motion. So now it's time to ask the question - are we covering motion within our design systems in the right way?

Show notes

• Introducing Figma Motion — the Config 2026 launch (24 June) that kicked this topic off: timeline on the canvas, animated components, and motion variables with modes
• Atlassian Design System — Motion — the foundations page Luke screen-shares, with the four principles and the semantic token bundles like motion.popup.enter; the Applying motion page covers composing custom motion, and the motion primitive component is the componentised bit
• Uber Base — Motion — Michelle's pick, with the accessibility-first guidelines, timing and easing, transitions, the atomic animation patterns, and the motion office hours
• Carbon — Motion and Material — Motion — the other tokenised examples
• The Animator's Survival Kit — book by Richard Williams
• Designing Interface Animation — book by Val Head
• Val Head at Converge US 2023 — "Animation, Your Design System, and You!"
• GSAP (now owned by Webflow) and Lottie — the dev-side enablers
• Cassie Evans' live-coded GSAP game talk — (SmashingConf Freiburg 2025, and State of the Browser 2026 has a recording with transcript)
• Bonnie Kate Wolf — the illustration systems work
• Blush — Pablo Stanley's composable illustration tool
• Kano model — the "emotional connection has been proved" reference
• Luke on Bluesky
• Michelle on Bluesky
• Email: community@zeroheight.com — and send your design system's motion docs, we want to see them!

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

A few years ago everyone started talking about how AI-powered interfaces are going to start generating UI on the fly. But how close is that from being a reality? Have there been any advances towards it being a mainstream thing? And what do we need to know from a design systems perspective to cater towards it?

Show notes

• Rachel-Lee Nabors — "Death of the Browser" — the talk that sparked the topic
• ChatGPT Apps SDK — the plugin-style generative UI route, with Booking.com among the launch partners
• Interactive apps in Claude (MCP Apps) — the Anthropic equivalent
• A2UI — Google's declarative spec letting agents send UI as component descriptions rather than executing code
• The Complete Guide to Generative UI Frameworks in 2026 — a rundown of the generative UI framework landscape, covering A2UI, CopilotKit/AG-UI, MCP Apps and more
• NN/g's 10 Usability Heuristics — the "codified best practice" comparison
• Geri Reid — the Converge US talk — Geri’s talk about flexibility and NewsKit

Get in touch

• Luke on Bluesky
• Michelle on Bluesky

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

We really screwed the pooch when it came to naming design systems. Why is the name so bad? And should we call it something else? Or should we bin the whole concept of design systems and start over in a completely decommodified way?

Show notes

• NASA Graphics Standards Manual — the classic design handbook Luke references
• A Pattern Language — Christopher Alexander's town planning/architecture book
• Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• Atomic Design — Brad Frost's original article, which credits the earlier pattern library work
• Anna Debenham and Laura Kalbag — referenced in that article as part of the origins
• Co-op Experience Library — Co-op's renamed design system; their follow-up post explains they changed the name because "design system" implies it's only for designers, which backs up the whole episode thesis Co-op Digital Blog
• Valve's Handbook for New Employees — the famously flat, no-job-titles structure Luke half-remembers (it was Valve, not Epic)
• Luke on Bluesky
• Michelle on Bluesky