ArtsDesign

Design System Office Hours

Davy Fung + PJ Onori

Davy and PJ, design system practitioners talk about design-led product ownership, scaling and adoption, community and engagement, design system team models, and much more.

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20 episodes
monthly
Avg 32 min
English

Episodes 20

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August 11 · 34 min
Ep 105: What's an AI-Native DS?
We discuss, you guess it, whatever ai-native means in the world of design systems, including that start of a new phase of PJ and Davy's design system spec that originated from this episode!
July 22 · 35 min
Ep 104: The Governance Junk Drawer
Davy and PJ debate how automation, visible chaos, and human judgment can help teams move fast without turning the design system into an expensive junk drawer.
July 9 · 36 min
Ep 103: Config 2026 Recap
Davy returns from Config with a backpack full of new Figma features. Also our annual discussion of were these releases for us?
June 9 · 36 min
Ep 102: Figma's History with AI
From the comical wizard prompts of 2024 to the heavy-lifting reality of Figma MCP, Davy and PJ chart the compressed timeline of design system and canvas automation.
May 26 · 36 min
Ep 101: Sharing Ideas and Open Source
Why do we build in public when corporate nature tells us to hoard our work? Davy and PJ break down the unglamorous reality of sharing open-source tools, micro-contributions, and why 90s music is a hill worth dying on.
May 7 · 35 min
Ep 100: Happy Podcast Bday, and Schemas
We hit the Centennial! In our 100th episode, Davy and PJ look back on 4 years of our design systems chatter, before diving deep into the future of design systems: a community-driven, machine-readable schema that moves us past the "Figma-as-Source-of-Truth" era.
April 24 · 36 min
Ep 99: Durable vs Temporal Artifacts
Davy talks about trading a week of manual Figma updates for a "code-to-canvas" workflow that gets us "close enough" while PJ talks about running multiple worker-based agents to do production and qa work in tandem. Are these burner tasks?
April 3 · 36 min
Ep 98: Zeroheight's 2026 DS Report Chatter
Davy and PJ dive into the Zeroheight's 2026 Design Systems Survey to figure out why 61% of teams are drowning in work while a third of them still have "no plans" to automate—plus, Davy forces PJ to listen to some truly questionable AI-generated design jokes.
March 18 · 30 min
Ep 97: Tokenize Everything
Davy and PJ dive into the future of design tokens, exploring how to "tokenize everything" from complex color transformations (OKLCH) to utility tokens for motion and content strings.
February 24 · 29 min
Ep 96: Trying Out New Tooling
Davy and PJ discuss why the future of design workflow isn't just better handoff—it’s starting with the code itself.
February 11 · 38 min
Ep 95: When Docs Becomes a Liability
Davy and PJ discuss the "liability" of stale documentation and why AI still needs human oversight. They explore using Figma’s API to automate visual updates and kill the "pain in the butt" of manual maintenance.
January 23 · 30 min
Ep 94: Tech Dependencies
Building vs. Inheriting: Davy and PJ discuss the performance cost of design system dependencies. Learn how to choose the right framework without bloating your system or losing control of your architecture.
January 5 · 30 min
Ep 93: 2026 and our 4th Podcast Bday
Davy and PJ celebrate four years of Design System Office Hours by looking ahead at the shifting landscape of 2026. They explore how interoperability, open-source tooling, and AI-driven documentation being major themes to uplevel design system practices.
Dec 18, 2025 · 23 min
Ep 92: Naming is Hard
Davy and PJ tackle the notorious difficulty of naming in design systems, advocating for human-readable, descriptive language over "cute" metaphors and discussing how AI is making file cleanliness more critical than ever.
Dec 4, 2025 · 26 min
Ep 91: The Erosion of Open Design Systems
Davy and PJ discuss a potential trend of major design systems going from public to internal only, stressing that public documentation is the ultimate forcing function for quality and a huge win for the community.
Nov 13, 2025 · 31 min
Ep 90: WTF is Craft
Davy and PJ talk about the term "craft," emphasizing that high-quality design work requires designers to understand engineering constraints and that a good design system needs to provide education, not just components and prototypes.
Oct 30, 2025 · 40 min
Ep 89: Figma Slots Conference
Davy talks to PJ about his trip to see Figma's slots conference, formerly known as Schema. We talk about the releases and rejoice on a focus on the main editor again.
Oct 15, 2025 · 26 min
Ep 88: Stay in Learning Mode w/ Ben Callahan
Davy talks to friend of the program, Ben Callahan from Sparkbox about his series The Question, which brings together design system designers bi-weekly to share and learn collaboratively in a 60-min workshop.
Sep 30, 2025 · 28 min
Ep 87: Thinking Like an Engineer
Davy and PJ talk about how amongst many good engineering traits, the rigor, and ways they work should be more adopted by product designers and specially us, maintainers. If we can track, version, and test our work as rigorously as engineers, we would be in a higher quality bar.
Sep 18, 2025 · 35 min
Ep 86: I'm New to the TEAM w/ Guy Segal
Davy talks special co-host, Guy Segal, about his first month at his new design systems job at Atlassian, and the fun of being a newbie after the first 30 days, when the going really starts getting tough.

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