After years of building, maintaining, and supporting in-house design systems with real tokens, governance, versioning, support, and contribution models, I recently found myself building with Tailwind and shadcn. Thanks, AI!
Phillip Lovelace
flippin' pixels into creative UI since 2002...
Hi, I'm Phillip.
I'm a Senior UX Developer with over two decades of experience building design systems, engineering UX at scale, and developing accessible, intuitive interfaces with clean, semantic code. I live somewhere between design and code, turning ideas into accessible, token-driven component systems with clean, semantic markup.
My work spans CSS architecture, web components, design tokens, accessibility, SEO, performance optimization, and more recently, AI tooling and MCP development. I care about the whole picture: the design system that keeps teams aligned and the production code that ships to users.
I'm based in Southern California with my wife and two sons. When I'm not flippin' pixels, I'm probably on a sideline or in some bleachers yelling things that definitely aren't helping.
Skills & Expertise
Want to chat? Get in touch or check out my portfolio.
Latest Posts, Quotes, Links & Ramblings
npm uninstall humans
In software, a dependency is a risk you accept. It's a package you didn't write, maintained by someone you've never met, that can break your entire application if it disappears. Good engineering means knowing which dependencies are worth the risk and which ones aren't. Right now, I'm watching our industry decide that people aren't worth…
· Feb 28, 2026 · Design & Dev
You’re Automating the Wrong 70%
I came across a Medium post titled "AI Will Replace 70% of Design System Work." The premise is that most design system work, documentation, component building, token management, accessibility audits, is "structurally automatable," and that the real value lies in governance. The author argues that teams need to move "upward from execution to orchestration" or…
· Feb 28, 2026 · Design Systems