UI Architect · Design Systems
I've spent twenty years building interfaces and, since 2021, running corporate design systems: first Luckia's, now the global UI architecture at Massimo Dutti. I write about design tokens, governance and the point where handoff between design and development breaks down.
There is a stage in a technical career where you keep writing code and also start deciding the architecture everyone else will use. The feeling of falling short on both fronts says nothing about the ability of the person feeling it: it measures the latency gap between two jobs that deliver their verdict on very different timescales.
On a large website with years behind it, the maintenance budget that gets approved and the one that gets spent look nothing alike. Part of it is debt taken on knowingly, with a due date. The rest is decay: components and CSS that pile up iteration after iteration because every single decision, taken on its own, was reasonable. AI-assisted generation multiplies that second part when there is no written architecture to steer it.
A dark campaign block inside a light page usually ends up as a parallel stylesheet and a second version of every component. The alternative is to treat the theme as a property of a container rather than of the page: what changes in the architecture, what stops costing money, and why the component that switches it fits in fifty lines.