zeroheight is the design system management platform used by companies across the globe. From documentation to measurement to automation, zeroheight acts as a central place for you to take your design system from zero to hero.

zeroheight

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

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Design systems kill creativity, right? We've heard that said so many times. But are we actually taking the time to inject joy into the system itself? Not only considering it as a part of the process for what we include in the system, but also in how we do documentation, release notes, and general communication around the design system? Or controversially... is it even important?


Design Systems WTF #49 - Are we delighting enough in our design systems?

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

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Set the scene - you've joined a new company as a product designer or engineer, and you're confronted with a massive system, with custom naming and opaque decisions. Queue anxiety. So how do we make our design systems easy to understand, and make them a strength for onboarding new joiners?


Design Systems WTF #48 - Do our design systems give new joiners anxiety?

Join us for another instalment of our deep dive webinar series, where we explore essential topics shaping the future of design systems with zeroheight.

This month, we’ll be looking at how to make sure your Figma files are in the best possible shape they can be, both for your design system and working with zeroheight.

We’ll cover how zeroheight plays with Figma with our integration, how best to organize your design system libraries, optimizing your files, and how we built our new Figma plugin to better handle the connection between zeroheight and Figma.

*We’ll cover:*

*   Tips, tricks and gotchas to make sure your Figma files don't become unwieldy
*   How to use the Figma plugin API to support your workflows
*   How we've approached working with the Figma API over the last seven years
*   How we approached the new Figma plugin, and how our integration works

Speakers:

Luke Murphy, Head of Advocacy

Robert Whitfield, Senior Product Designer

Tom Daly, Product Engineer


zeroheight deep dive: Setting up your Figma files for success

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

***

It's time to peer into the crystal ball and predict what's coming up for design systems this year and further out. Will AI take all our jobs? Are design systems becoming a thing of the past? Will we finally kill all creativity? Or are we still plodding along to general adoption?


Design Systems WTF #47 - What will happen in design systems in 2026?

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

***

Design systems folks seem to be prone to burnout, arguments, and generally feeling hard done by within their organizations. What makes design systems folks so prone to being loaded with additional weight? We talk about why this happens, as well as some tactics to get around it.


Design Systems WTF #46 - What's with the emotional baggage with design systems?

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

***

Time to get spicy... One of the big promises of the hype of design systems was that it would reduce organizational and product complexity by providing efficient, replicable ways of doing things. Now that we've bedded in, its time to ask - how much do design systems actually reduce complexity? Do they just reorganize and make complexity more palatable?


Design Systems WTF #45 - Do design systems reduce complexity or just reorganize it?

Join us for another instalment of our deep dive webinar series, where we explore essential topics shaping the future of design systems with zeroheight.

This month, we’ll be looking at how to systematize your use of zeroheight.

We’ll cover how to create replicable, reliable documentation using features like custom templating, synced pages, internal tagging, embeds, design blocks, and footer blocks — and give a peek behind the curtain at how we approached building two of our newest AI-powered features.

*We’ll cover:*

*   What it means to create your documentation in a systematic way
*   How you can create custom templates and synced pages to ensure your documentation is consistent
*   Tips and tricks using the other blocks
*   Using AI to scale fast and maintain consistency — including how we approached building these new capabilities

Speakers:

Luke Murphy, Head of Advocacy

Lewis Smith-Tong, Senior Product Manager

Chace Stewart, Senior Product Engineer


zeroheight deep dive: Build once, scale faster: Systematizing your Design System docs

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

***

A bit of a deep topic this week – how important is consistency as a concept to be aiming for with design systems? Obviously, it's one of our design systems' selling points, but in a world where we're moving more and more towards browserless, how important is component consistency, or can we see a place where foundational consistency is all we need?


Design Systems WTF #44 - Should we care about consistency?

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

***

We took a few months off and y'all went and changed everything... We dive into the wonderful world of contextual design systems. Do MCPs finally offer what we need to make our design systems serve information up contextually? Are there major things we need to refactor? Or is it all smoke and mirrors?


Design Systems WTF #43 - Are we finally at the point of contextual documentation?

Join us for the another instalment of our deep dive webinar series, where we explore essential topics shaping the future of design systems with zeroheight. This month we'll be looking at extending zeroheight, via the API and the recently released MCP server! We'll be covering off what this actually enables, what other teams are doing, and a deep dive on how you can use both of them.

**We’ll cover:**

*   What the API and MCP server allow you to unlock
*   Some ideas for what this can enable
*   How we approached designing the API
*   How we approached offering the MCP server
*   What's coming in the future

Speakers:

Luke Murphy, Head of Advocacy

Lucy Harris, Senior Product Manager

Seth Corker, Full Stack Product Engineer


zeroheight deep dive: Using the zeroheight API and MCP server

DS Live is a new webinar series from zeroheight where we invite the best speakers from around the world to deliver talks on design systems, and everything that goes on around them, with live Q\&A after the talk.

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Design systems aren’t just about consistency anymore, they’re becoming the connective tissue between people, tools, and intelligent agents. In this talk, TJ Pitre introduces the idea of Context-Based Design Systems - systems that don’t just describe what components look like, but embed what they *mean*, how they *behave*, and when they *should be used*. You’ll learn how this shift supports AI-enabled workflows, reduces ambiguity, and creates space for better collaboration between design and engineering. This talk is for anyone tired of treating broken handoffs and shallow documentation as status quo and curious about what happens when we build systems that are designed to think ahead.


DS Live: TJ Pitre - Context-Based Design Systems: Preparing for an AI-Driven Future

DS Live is a new webinar series from zeroheight where we invite the best speakers from around the world to deliver talks on design systems, and everything that goes on around them, with live Q\&A after the talk.

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For the next DS Live we're inviting our favourite design systems consultant, Amy Hupe, to do a great talk all about jargon.

In this talk, Amy will explore the theme of jargon. She’ll talk about why it’s important to avoid jargon when communicating with colleagues and users, and when it can actually be a good thing.


DS Live: Amy Hupe - A Whole Lot of Nonsense

Join us for another instalment of our deep dive webinar series, where we explore the tools and practices shaping the future of design systems.

This month, we’re revisiting MCP (Model Context Protocol). A lot has changed since our last session on MCP — including our newest MCP-powered integrations like the zeroheight connector for Figma Make — and we’re taking a practical look at how to connect your design system to the AI tools your teams are already using.

We’ll explore how MCP enables designers, developers, and product teams to move from static documentation to live, contextual guidance inside tools like VS Code, Claude, Cursor, and Figma Make — keeping components, tokens, patterns, and usage guidance in the loop from the start.

You’ll see demos across three evolving areas:

*   **Traditional workflows — with AI assistance**
*   Ask your design system questions in natural language instead of browsing static docs — and apply the guidance with confidence, right where you’re working.
*   **Auditing and strengthening your design system**
*   Use MCP to audit and test your design system holistically. Pressure-testing across the system, documentation, and code to ensure it's up to scratch alongside product implementation.
*   **From AI-accelerated prototyping to AI-driven development**
*   See how tools like Figma Make — and AI in the IDE — can move teams from idea to prototype to production faster, while staying grounded in your components, tokens, and guardrails. Faster builds, without drifting from your design system standards.

We’ll also go behind the scenes on how MCP works, what challenges we’ve solved to make design system content usable by AI, and what’s coming next — including opportunities to get involved in our MCP early-adopter programme.

If you’re thinking about how to keep your design system relevant — and reliable — in an AI-powered workflow, this deep dive is for you.


MCP, vibe coding, your design system: What’s possible

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

***

Now we're in the business of creating context for AI (ew), what is actually important when we're creating documentation that will be used by machines AND humans? Are detailed component guidelines important? Are the foundations essential to get right? Or can we rely on top-level patterns and vague guidance?


Design Systems WTF #50 - Do MCPs care more about patterns or components?

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

***

Once you've done a first pass on anything in your design system, how do you validate it? Do you create complicated automated tests to ensure absolute consistency? Or do you even put it in front of real people to make sure it works?


Design Systems WTF #51 - What do you actually test? 

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q\&A from the live audience.

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Time for the hot takes - do design systems need product management? Or is it something that just gets in the way and stops work happening?
