Writing on design systems, AI, and accessibility, focused on decision-making, risk, and long-term product outcomes.
Designing with mustard is the future of design. I used to think it was ketchup, but I was wrong. If you're not currently designing with mustard, you should get out of design and tech. The future of design is mustard. Adapt or perish.
This work book is a 30-item diagnostic that design system leads can used to govern systems while keeping accessibility intact at AI scale.
When AI generates a broken variant, who owns the fix? A six-question governance framework for design system leads keeping accessibility intact at AI scale.
Why AI depends on the foundation accessible design systems build — and how "AI will fix accessibility" is producing the opposite outcome at industry scale.
As teams use AI tools to generate high-fidelity prototypes, the focus shifts to output instead of purpose. Prototyping should be about testing ideas and learning what actually works before building.
A small but important change: my newsletter is now called Digital Arcana. In this post, I explain the rename, acknowledge the overlap that prompted it, and share why this new chapter feels like a stronger foundation for the work ahead.
What we learned rebuilding the Microsoft Inclusive Design website with the communities we serve and a discussion around what accessibility and inclusive design means in this current era.
What America by Design reveals about how public platforms fail when maintenance, governance, and accountability are treated as optional and how we can do better no matter our job title.
This piece explores how score-driven metrics can distort decision-making, and why grounding success in real use, context, and human experience leads to better accessibility and design outcomes than dashboards alone.
If an email adds noise, I unsubscribe immediately or mark it as spam. So this list is based on writers who regularly deliver stuff that I like to read. If I included it here, it's because the writing is consistent and well done, centering disability justice, accessibility, design, and technology.
A personal reflection on focus, autism, and accessibility, what focus has given me in clarity and self-acceptance, and why I’m choosing to keep building better systems, even when clarity is hard to hold, as we head into 2026.
I’ve been tagged to join in the Tag You’re It microblogging trend and took the opportunity to talk about my experience of writing and speaking in the tech space in the past ten years, as well as capture what I believe the future can look like.
Leaving Twitter became necessary to preserve my values and principles, even if it meant relinquishing a platform that had once carried my voice.
For some, sharing Wordle results is a small comfort, for others it is an annoyance in their feed. But for others, these posts go beyond annoying—they’re inaccessible.
Depending on what you are looking to do, there are many effective tools for designers. Anything can be a design tool, Photoshop, PowerPoint, paper, pencil…or even ketchup.
Protect yourself and your company from buying an ineffective product that claims it makes websites accessible. This article was originally published with the UX Collective on Medium, July 14th, 2021, by Anna E, Cook. The Overlay It was the end of another long Thursday as my colleague, and I sat at her desk, staring at the screen. Monica and I were both Product Designers who had joined a company…
Learn how to find accessibility issues in your existing design systems and documenting those issues in a way that makes them actionable for yourselves and your teams.
Social media proliferates dopamine rewards and thereby enables addiction. Stories push this even further by limiting our exposure to a story to a time limit and then showing us something new.
How my celiac disease led me to realize the risk of search suggestions, suggested results, and lack of information when using digital food delivery experiences.
Many designers are familiar with the tactics that products use to create addictive behaviors, but how are we evaluating the difference between a manipulative pattern and a winning experience?