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One of my most recent projects was designing an agentic design system for an AI-powered marketing platform.
The goal was to build a product where engineers orchestrate AI agents to generate product experiences.
Designing for this environment very much changed the way I think about design systems.
A few lessons that kept coming up throughout the project:
▶️ Start with a strong, simple architecture. It's the foundation that both developers and AI agents rely on to navigate the system.
▶️ Design the architecture together with engineering before building components. Aligning early saves a lot of complexity later.
▶️ Before investing in the entire system, validate the approach first. Make sure it supports the bigger vision before scaling it across hundreds of components.
▶️ A design system is no longer just a component library. It's context.
▶️ Components need to communicate more than visuals. Purpose, behaviour, constraints, and intended usage.
▶️ Maintain consistent naming across design and code to avoid drift.
▶️ The fewer ways there are to build the same experience, the more predictable and consistent the outcome.
Have you worked on an agentic design system before? What lessons have you learned?
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How we use AI as a tool to accelerate our workflow at HSS?
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The full case study for the project is available here: https://www.hsstudio.fr/noma
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