Between the Lines: July 2026
A couple of new training clients, what we heard on a recent discovery call, and the harder question we're working through about who design systems are really for.
It's been a busy stretch since Config: new client conversations, a new project kicking off with two more starting in the coming weeks, and a course going into production. Here's a look at what we've been working on and thinking about:
On our minds
On a discovery call recently, we asked if anyone on the call had caught what came out of Config this year. Nobody had. They'd been focused on getting more comfortable with the tool already in front of them, not on whatever had just shipped. It's something we're hearing a lot lately. There's so much to learn right now, AI is elbowing its way into every workflow, and it's easy to not know where to start. So teams start with what's already open on their screen. That's usually the right call.
It feels like there's a lot up in the air on the tooling side right now. Getting your design files into good, healthy standing and making sure your team understands the principles behind it — that's one of the more useful things you can be putting time into right now. That's also a big part of why training keeps feeling like some of the most useful work we do.
In the work
Joey's onboarding onto a new project this month, working in collaboration with Southleft. It's good to see that partnership taking shape, and to get a clearer sense of how bringing different perspectives together shapes the work we can offer clients. Beyond that, he's also spent a lot of time on calls with potential clients and people across the industry, the kind of conversations that don't always turn into a project. But, some of the best ones never do.
Murphy's been wearing more than one hat this stretch. Strategy work, proposals, hands-on client work, sometimes all in the same day. It's the kind of busy she thrives on 🌪️. And the proposal side of things still feels weirdly calming, which she can’t fully explain. She's also looking forward to a couple of upcoming projects that are shaping up to be meaty and complex.
Katie's been heads down recording lessons for our new course, Figma, Beyond the Basics — For Brand & Marketing Creatives. It's built for designers who came up in Adobe's tools and are now expected to work fluently in Figma — less a beginner course, more a way to close that specific gap. By the end, each person walks away with an actual brand style guide, published as a library they can reuse for any client. The first cohort starts in August. 🔥
We've also landed a couple of new training clients this month. Teaching is one of the parts of this work we love most: watching a team go from finding their way around a file to understanding why things are built the way they are, and how to use the tools they already have to move faster instead of working around them. It never gets old.
The intersection of building and teaching is what shapes Baseline. For anyone newer here: we're a design systems practice, working across both consulting and teaching engagements. Sometimes that looks like building a system alongside a team. Sometimes it's training one to run it well, and a lot of the time it's both at once. If that's something you need support with, we’d love to chat.
Notes from the work
We’ve been exploring a tricky question across several recent projects: who is a system really being built for these days? It used to be enough to build something a beginner could learn and an expert could move fast in, and that's still true; it's just not the whole list anymore. Agents are starting to read these systems too, deciding which component to reach for or which pattern applies, sometimes with consequences for who ends up seeing what. No pressure. Building something that holds up for a newer designer, a senior one, and a model making a judgment call in the background is a different problem than most of us trained for, and we don't have an answer that we default to out of the gate just yet. We're taking it case by case, based on what each team we're working with actually needs.
On our radar
The Shape of Apps is about Mac app icons, but it reads like design system thinking. Louie Mantia traces how Apple slowly forced every icon into a single squircle shape. It's a shared constraint that once felt like a straightjacket to skilled designers; he defends it as the thing that lets every icon read as an icon, no matter who made it or how skilled they are. The container versus canvas distinction he draws is basically the same argument we have internally about tokens versus components, just with icons instead.
Interface Lineage is a new library from design engineer Johannes Mutter that takes interaction patterns apart and gives them names: the spring behind pull to refresh, the safe triangle that keeps a submenu open while your cursor drifts toward it. The pitch is that naming a mechanism is what lets a team reuse it, teach it, and defend a decision instead of only liking it. Still in beta, but the framing lines up with something we say a lot: a system only helps a team if it has language for its own decisions, not just examples of them.
I Think I Have LLM Burnout is a developer's account of watching his job shift from writing code to reviewing a model's version of it, over and over. He's not anti-AI (he says he's more productive because of it), but the fatigue is specific and easy to recognize: the same tics and the same kinds of mistakes, showing up again and again until reviewing starts to feel like the whole job. A good one to read alongside whatever your team's AI adoption looks like right now — less a warning, more a nudge to notice which parts of a day have become review instead of making.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week! 👋 💛
– The Baseline team
Incase you missed it
Our team published a few other things this month. Check them out below:
