The cocktail napkin is older than design.

Designs should be simple. Interactions within design should be ridiculously simple. A decade of design systems taught me that complexity is almost always a sign that someone upstream didn’t make a decision.

Figma is the right place to start. It’s almost never the long-term source of truth. The moment you’re building a real design system, the npm package starts pulling ahead — and knowing when to go back to Figma to reconcile, versus when to keep building forward, is the judgment most teams never develop.

AI in design is a knowledge problem before it’s a prompt problem. Most teams skip straight to prompting, then wonder why the output sounds like no one who works there.

The napkin sketch is the spec. Figma is a translation, code is a translation, and the meeting where someone asks “but what did you mean by this?” is what happens when the intent didn’t survive the trip.

Simple, yet strong. Knots and components work the same way — they hold until the requirements change, and then you see what you actually built.