Evolution of Design Systems: Beyond Components

A design system is more than just a Figma file and a Storybook. It's the language of your product. In 2025, we are seeing the rise of 'headless' design systems that can manifest natively across web, mobile, and spatial computing interfaces. The days of copy-pasting hex codes are over.

From Components to Tokens

We've moved beyond the atomic design methodology of atoms and molecules. The new atomic unit is the Design Token. Tokens capture design decisions—color, spacing, typography, motion—in a platform-agnostic format (typically JSON). This allows a single source of truth to power:

• A React web app (via CSS variables)
• An iOS app (via Swift values)
• A Unity dashboard (via C# structs)

AI-Generated UI

With Generative UI, design systems are becoming the constraints for AI models. Instead of manually assembling screens, we provide the AI with our design tokens and component definitions, and it reassembles them on the fly based on user intent. This requires our components to be incredibly robust and composable.

The role of the Design Systems Engineer is evolving into a Design API Architect. We are building the infrastructure that allows product teams (and AI agents) to build consistently at warp speed.