Bold moves from Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke, shared in an internal memo. On general AI usage: ​“Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance.”

On prototyping: ​“AI must be part of your GSD Prototype phase. The prototype phase of any GSD project should be dominated by AI exploration. Prototypes are meant for learning and creating information. AI dramatically accelerates this process. You can learn to produce something that other team mates can look at, use, and reason about in a fraction of the time it used to take.”

AI skills will be a part of the performance reviews and affect future hiring. Highly recommend reading an entire thing.

The team at Figma talked to several industry experts from Google’s Material Design team, Spotify, Shopify, and Stripe about how they’re managing the future of design systems — from tooling to automation to accessibility. 

José Torre, Staff Product Designer at Shopify, gave a Config talk about getting the most out of design systems. The article he published earlier this year is a great summary of his thoughts on this topic.

Alek Mackie, a Senior Illustrator at Shopify, shares how he stays creative and productive.

“In this episode, Charli talks with Sara Hill and Dan Ross product design leads at Shopify. They show off the evolution of the Shopify design system, how they’ve managed to scale it, and the challenges they faced along the way.”

Komal Javed from Shopify shows how to set up your Figma projects to meet the needs of your whole team. Project Index Template is available in Figma Community.

Polaris for Admin Web UI kit is focused on building and creating products for Shopify.

Shopify used Variants to clean up their local design system for retail.

The team members from Shopify, Condé Nast, and Harry’s shared their experiences creating multi-brand design systems in a livestream a few months ago. This post shares some of the highlights from it.

Tobias Negele, a Staff Product Designer at Shopify, shares their approach and template for organizing files and creating a predictable structure that engineers and other colleagues can easily understand and navigate.

Designers from Shopify, Condé Nast, and Harry’s share their experiences with creating and maintaining a design system across multiple brands.