the sketchbook
Updates, experiments, and small ideas from building the system. New posts when there's something worth saying.
The first Zen is a clean sheet of paper. The second is the same sheet after someone started drawing on it — construction lines visible, script captions in the margin, a draft stamp in the corner. Same tokens. More character.
keep reading →Zen, Bricks, Brutalist, Terminal, Blueprint. Same HTML, five stylesheets, five very different products. Notes on how keeping the HTML still forces the system to prove itself.
keep reading →Japanese indigo dye is cooler, deeper, and carries a history that "blue" in CSS land doesn't. A short post on picking an accent that doesn't look like every other design system on the internet.
keep reading →After years of waiting, container queries hit "I don't think about them" status. A quick look at where the system uses them and where it still prefers the media-query escape hatch.
keep reading →The CSS IS AWESOME meme works because it's honest. Most systems would patch the overflow away. This one keeps it — and I want to talk about why that matters more than it sounds.
keep reading →Agents are going to touch design systems next. Early sketch of a companion CLI (cia) and an MCP server that exposes tokens and mixins as tools — so ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can actually reason about this system, not just autocomplete around it.
Shipped the first npm release. Tokens, light/dark theming, a large mixin API, and Figma tokens that stay in sync. Here's what's inside, what almost made it, and what's next.
keep reading →