September 1, 2026 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #574
This newsletter issue was sent out to 174,883 subscribers on Tuesday, September 1, 2026.
Editorial
Design systems have evolved tremendously over the years. What started merely as a library of UI components has grown into standalone products — often multi-brand, multi-themed, with voice and tone guidelines, decision trees, dependencies, and most recently AI-ready.
In this newsletter, we explore the modern world of design systems — the state of AI in them, dependency graphs, how to deal with snowflake components, and how to make design systems AI-ready.
We’ll also cover design systems at our upcoming SmashingConf Freiburg 2026 🇩🇪 — with a lovely mix of friendly people, insightful conversations, unforgettable networking — and hands-on workshops as well. We’d love to see you there! Jump to last tickets.
Also coming up in online workshops in September:
- Design Patterns For Complex UIs & Enterprise UX UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Sep 2–3 - Naming Design Systems DS
with Samantha Gordashko. Sep 8–22 - Interface Design Patterns Live UX Training UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Sep 11 – Oct 12 - Figma MCP Masterclass Design
with Christine Vallaure. Sep 14 - Accessibility For Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Sep 21–29 - Figma Workflow Masterclass Design
with Christine Vallaure. Sep 23–29 - Live Accessibility Testing Free
with Manuel Matuzović. Sep 24 - Jump to all workshops
Have a fantastic start to Autumn, everyone! 🎉🥳
— Vitaly
1. State Of AI In Design Systems
How do design systems talk to machines? Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent’s field study “State of AI in Design Systems” shares interesting insights into the current state of things. It explores how design systems implement and distribute agentic tooling for DS contribution and consumption, how teams coerce the models into staying on system, and patterns that almost every team has landed on.
DesignSystems.one also ran an audit to find out which design systems are agent-ready by scoring them against five concrete signals. To keep the findings up-to-date, the systems are re-audited quarterly.
2. Design Systems For People Who Ship
Whether you’re completely new to design systems or looking for tips to drive adoption or getting your design system ready for AI, DesignSystems.one is for you. The site not only features practical guides to answer your design system-related questions, but it is also a living library of 88 design systems from leading companies, with screenshots, tokens, breakdowns, and a ready-to-use design.md for any of them.
3. Making Design Systems LLM-Readable
LLMs can’t use a design system properly when vibe coding. They fabricate token names, guess values, and lose context between sessions, making your prototype feel off. Hardik Pandya shares a method for restructuring your design system into a format LLMs can reliably consume. It constraints the LLM at every point where it would otherwise guess, ensuring that your 10th AI session produces the same visual quality as your first.
4. Multi-Brand Design System
How do you create a design system that works seamlessly across multiple brands and multiple systems? That was the challenge that Ness Grixti and her team at Wise faced. Following a brand refresh and the launch of an editorial design system, they restructured the entire setup, developing a multi-brand, multi-token infrastructure for Wise. Ness shares valuable insights into her team’s approach.
5. Dependency Graphs
Even small changes can lead to unexpected impact across a design system. To prevent that from happening, the Figma plugin Impact Atlas visualizes how your tokens and components connect and how changes propagate through your files. Lineage does a similar job: The plugin visualizes component and style dependencies to help you understand how every change affects your project.
To keep track of the components in your project, also be sure to check out Component Tracker. The Figma plugin creates a list of all the components in use, distinguishing between components from libraries and those created locally.
6. Snowflake Components
Maybe you’ve been there before: The official design system didn’t cover what you needed, so you ended up designing a custom component. Instead of letting those one-off snowflake components live in a personal Figma file that no one else ever finds, Chela Giraldo documents them in a Snowflake Component Library, a clear, shared space that gives everyone the necessary context.
7. Design Token Naming Guide
Design system tokens are the building blocks of a design language, helping you make your design consistent and easy to scale. But how do you name your tokens properly? The Design Token Naming Guide summarizes everything you need to know to master naming conventions in six short, interactive lessons. And once you’re familiar with the theory, you can use the naming tool to build your design token system right away.
8. Accessible UX Research, Now Shipping 📚
We’ve got exciting news! Our newest Smashing book, Accessible UX Research by Michele A. Williams, is finally shipping worldwide! Get the book right away or order the eBook for instant download.
Accessible UX Research is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the book right away.
9. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Design Patterns For Complex UIs and Enterprise UX UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Sep 2–3 - Naming Design Systems DS
with Samantha Gordashko. Sep 8–22 - Interface Design Patterns Live UX Training UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Sep 11 – Oct 12 - Figma MCP Masterclass Design
with Christine Vallaure. Sep 14 - Accessibility For Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Sep 21–29 - Figma Workflow Masterclass Design
with Christine Vallaure. Sep 23–29 - Live Accessibility Testing Free
with Manuel Matuzović. Sep 24 - Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Video Course + UX Training - Jump to all workshops →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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