“It’s interesting how AI is good at the things I don’t understand, but is somehow dogshit at the things I’m good at…”
– Anonymous
Phillip Lovelace
Sr. UX Developer · Design Systems · Human
I work where design meets code. I enjoy building design systems, engineering accessible UX, and creating the AI tooling that keeps it all connected.
What I Do Somewhere between pixels and code
Design Systems
Components, tokens, and theming that keep teams consistent and shipping, plus the docs and governance that drive adoption.
UX Engineering
Semantic HTML, CSS architecture, accessibility, and performance. The production code that turns a design into something people can use.
AI Tooling & MCP
Claude skills, MCP servers, and workflows that teach AI tools to follow the design system instead of guessing at it.
Recent Work From the day job & side hustles
View my portfolio →
Pine Design System
Professional
A design system built on custom web components and token-based theming, with an SVG icon library and Storybook docs that teams build on every day.
Excellent TC
Freelance
A responsive site for a real estate transaction coordinator, with custom layouts and form handling.
From the Blog Thoughts, rants & the occasional hot take
Read my blog →- Paying Down Skill Debt
Every engineer knows the deal with technical debt. You take a shortcut to ship something today, and you pay for it later. The interest compounds quietly until one day a simple change takes a week, and nobody remembers why. I think I've been taking on a different kind of debt.
· · Personal
- The Roots at Blue Note
I haven't seen The Roots live since I lived in Berlin many years ago. That sentence covers more time than I want to think about. So when I heard they were coming to the Blue Note in LA, I immediately knew I wanted to attend. The band and the venue did not disappoint.
· · Personal
- Find Me in the Atmosphere
This weekend, I wired my website into the AT Protocol. It took an afternoon and one stubbornly old config file, and now my writing lives on the network itself.
· · Personal
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- AI fills the gaps. Just not at depth
Last month, a Cloudflare engineer used AI to rebuild a major open-source project in under a week. Cost about $1,100. It shipped to production. Around the same time, a different Cloudflare team used AI to fork another project and silently stripped out the security protections the original maintainers had spent years adding. That also shipped.…
· · Design & Dev
- When the Autocomplete Changes Its Mind
Tailwind usage is at an all-time high. Revenue is down 80%. Documentation traffic dropped 40% over two years. AI didn't kill Tailwind. AI now picks Tailwind. Every prompt. Every team. Without anyone choosing. And the moment it picks something else, every codebase built on top of that decision is on its own.
· · 1 comment · Design & Dev
About The human behind the pixels
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.
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.
Thanks for visiting. Be kind, hydrate, repeat.
