Your Design System Deserves a Shirt

A design system isn’t just UI tokens or Figma libraries; it’s a shared visual language, just like a company shirt is a shared symbol.

My Design System Shirt

A fun part of agency culture is that we never need a reason to make a shirt — for every event, every engagement, someone designs one. At 1904Labs, one year I designed our BizDash 5K shirts: a hand-drawn character saying, “I’d rather be running code.” Looking back, those shirts to felt less like swag; they were milestones.

Having fun, good-quality shirts became a kind of career benchmark for me  — specifically when at agencies and consultancies. Much like flying out of state for a 3-day client onsite felt like graduating to a prestigious level of consulting that is depicted in film and television. But, flying doesn't quite say the same thing about a team, it's collaborative culture and the pride of ownership that a shirt does.

This morning, I realized I was wearing the shirt for the Element design system,which is the name of the internally-facing design system for one of my clients. This design system had a dedicated team. Although the UX team that I was part of didn't directly contribute to that design system, we leveraged it heavily  — pulling out components, breaking them into instances and creating new variants for our individual app teams. Our team contributed our unique components to a shared Figma Library that became it's own unofficial offspring of Element. Seeing this shirt made me smile — because that shirt was a symbol of our shared ownership of something beautiful, useful, and built with thought.

When teams love their design systems enough to put them on a shirt, that’s a beautiful thing. It means the system isn’t just documentation; it’s identity.