Matthew Ström

In 1969, the people in charge of Apollo 11 trusted a 23-year-old engineer in a back room of mission control to make one of the most consequential decisions of this decade-defining mission. And they did so in seconds, without deliberating or debating.

Next time you’re faced with a decision, ask yourself: how can this decision be made on the lowest level? Have you given your team the authority to decide? If you haven’t, why not? If they’re not able to make good decisions, you’ve missed an opportunity to be a leader. Empower, enable, and entrust them. Take it from NASA: the ability to delegate quickly and decisively was the key to landing men on the moon.

There is a disconnect between product design and product engineering.

Interfaces are becoming less dense.

...[Density is] It’s not just the way an interface looks at one moment in time; it’s about the amount of information an interface can provide over a series of moments. It’s about how those moments are connected through design design decisions, and how those decisions are connected to the value the software provides.

...UI density is the value a user gets from the interface divided by the time and space the interface occupies.

In the four years since [Darl Koopersmith and Wilson Miner's Designing accessible color systems post], Stripe has stretched those colors to the limit. The design system’s resilience through massive growth is a testament to the team’s original approach, but last year we started to see the need for a more flexible, scalable, and inclusive color system. This meant both an expansion of our color palette and a rethinking of how we generate and apply these colors to accommodate our still-growing products.

This essay will take you through my attempts to solve these problems. Through this process, I’ve created a tool for generating expressive, functional, and accessible color systems for any design system. I’ll share the full code of my solution at the end of the essay; it represents not just a technical solution but a philosophical shift in how we think about color in design systems, emphasizing the balance between creativity and inclusivity.

A tweet (xeet?) on my timeline asked: “what does polish in an app mean? fancy animations? clear consistent design patterns? hierarchy and colour? all the above?” I thought about it for a moment and got a familiar itch in the back of my brain. It’s a feeling that I associate with a zen kōan that goes (paraphrased): "A monk asked a zen master, ‘Does a dog have Buddha-nature?’ The master answered ‘無’. 無 (pronounced ‘wú’ in Mandarin or ‘mu’ in Japanese) literally translates to ‘not,’ as in ‘i have not done my chores today.’ It’s a negation of something, and in the koan’s case, it’s the master’s way of saying — paradoxically — that there’s no point in answering the question.

...In the case of the tweet, my 無-sense was tingling as I wrote a response: polish is something only the person who creates it will notice. It’s a paradox; polishing something makes it invisible. Which also means that pointing out examples of polish almost defeats the purpose.

...The polish paradox is that the highest degrees of craft and quality are in the spaces we can’t see, the places we don’t necessarily look. Polish can’t be an afterthought. It must an integral part of the process, a commitment to excellence from the beginning. The unseen effort to perfect every hidden aspect elevates products from good to great.

This is a very short book about copying. Its contents, unless otherwise noted, are licensed under CC-BY SA 4.0 (more on that in a bit). You can download, copy, remix, excerpt, change, and repost it however you see fit.

Prescriptive feedback limits creative collaboration. I’ve seen it time and time again, but I’ve struggled to articulate the exact reasons and their remedies. Recently, though, I got some insight from an unusual source: a game of chess.

When I was a product designer, people would ask what I did for a living, and sometimes I’d answer “I draw pictures of websites.”

Sure, I could just say “I design websites.” That’s true. The end result of my work is (hopefully) that a website looks better, works better, or results in better outcomes.

But most of my day isn’t spent looking at the website, or working on the code of the website, or manipulating the website directly in some way. It’s spent in Figma or Sketch, drawing pictures of how I think the website should look and work.

Through some kind of alchemy, the pictures I draw have an impact on the finished website. But they’re not all the same.

1. Good design principles are memorable.
2. Good design principles help you say no.
3. Good design principles aren't truisms.
4. Good design principles are applicable.

As Nosrat provides a simple list of essential ingredients for any great meal, can we describe a simple list of essential components for digital products?

Here are four elements that I believe are the foundation of great digital products: Research, Empathy, Simplicity and Speed.

Recently I’ve had a few opportunities to use code to create design. In two of my bigger projects at The Wall Street Journal, writing code has led to new ideas. Problems that typically plague early designs — e.g. “how does this look with real content?” — are easy to solve. By exploring visual ideas directly in code, I’ve started to see the amazing potential of code as a design tool.

Design is a radically different exercise than it was in the 18th, 13th, or 5th century. Industrialization has made the world more deeply interconnected, automated, and chaotic. The aesthetics of the things around us are not in the way they look to us, but in the way they came to be, and the way they shape the future.

Beauty is no longer skin-deep.

Forget 10×. With a focus on outcomes and an eye towards the border between net-positive and net-negative work, any team can push their productivity beyond their previous limits.

...If you can perform one task better than most people, you might be a 10× designer or developer or product manager (or whatever you are). But if your team can find small ways to make many of their tasks net-positive, 10× is just the start.

Today, most design systems work like dictionaries, composed of a finite set of definitions. But there’s a new page turning, one that ushers in the age of functions. Design systems are evolving to survive in a world where applications and experiences exist on vastly different screen sizes, for different accessibility needs, language modes, hardware specifications, and spatial dimensions. For these complex interfaces, dictionaries just can’t cut it.

Design systems are starting to use functions that recreate the design decision making process, responding appropriately to any input they are given. The early uses of functions do a great job of extending the reach of design systems. But the potential is vast.