What I Loved This Year
My favourite Creators, Tools, and Resources
👋 Get weekly insights, tools, and templates to help you build and scale design systems. More: Design Tokens Mastery Course / YouTube / My Linkedin
This year, I stopped getting ready to get ready.
I went deep on AI and treated it like a mirror for my work: every workflow I had… I questioned. Some stayed. Many didn’t. Only Google spits out instant results → everything worth building takes reps.
If you read, replied, challenged me, shared your story, or trusted me with your work this year, THANK YOU. You made this year. 💛
If you want to go on a deep dive during the quiet days, here’s a curated list of what I built and published (or prepared) this year.
Start here
Guides
Skills are for workflows. Projects are for contexts.
A bridge that lets Claude read your token files directly, eliminating copy‑paste forever.
Creators 💛
(if you don’t follow them, start now 😊)
Alexander Fandén
Design Systems @Stripe
Check his 🔗 portfolio (inspiring for any design system designer) and listen to his 🔗 interview.
Vitaly Friedman
Vitaly is THE real UX king, sharing invaluable resources about all things design and UX.
Sil Bormüller
Founder of Into Design Systems
🔗 Website
🔗 YouTube
Sam I am Designs 🫶 🇨🇦 / Samantha Gordashko
🔗 Substack
🔗 Design Tokens aren’t enough. Architecture Decisions need a place in your Design System.
Ileania Notarangelo
Partner & Creative Director @ ILLO
My god, these animations are out of this world. Just check their work at illo.tv
Andressa Lombardo
Design System Lead @ Miro | Teacher @ Memorisely | Host @ IDS
Justine Montgomery
Design systems @Stripe
Listen to her talk about building a design system portfolio. Loooots of useful tips!
Growthmates with Kate Syuma
Growth Advisor, ex-Miro | Founder at Growthmates | Speaker · Creator
🔗 High-quality principles to support your Product-Led-Growth
Robin di Capua
David Aerne
David is the true color’s wizard and one of the best interaction developers I know :)
🔗 Farbvelo
🔗 Generative Copic Color Wheel
Useful tools and resources
aidesign.guide
Everything you need to integrate AI into your design workflow. Practical guides, prompting techniques, and curated resources for designers.
bunny.net
🔗 Website
bunny.net is a high-performance CDN with a globally distributed edge network, optimized routing, and aggressive caching (built to deliver content fast and reliably at scale).
I used bunny.net to integrate with storage (via the API) and build my illustration database (both with Figma Make and Cursor). It’s really easy to use and there is no "enterprise” complexity.
🔗Anthropic YouTube Channel where you can learn a lot about how to use Claude + Claude Code
🔗 Lenny’s podcast and newsletter Lenny Rachitsky 👌
What I’m carrying into 2026
Less “instant” thingies.
More focus.
More systems that make the next thing easier to build.
Wishing you an unforgettable start to the new year. 🥰
Romina
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Thanks for the shoutout! ;)
Didn't expect this take. So true, but what about the creative spark?