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Insights

Notes on product design, conversion, design systems, and what actually works when building for real clients.

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Design Systems · Aug 2026 · 9 min

Design tokens vs. hardcoded values: the audit that actually finds what's leaking through

Where hardcoded hex and pixel values actually hide in a codebase with a token file, five grep commands that find them, and how to turn the audit into a permanent gate instead of a one-time cleanup.

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Accessibility · Jul 2026 · 10 min

Accessibility failures are design decisions. Here is the proof.

94.8% of homepages fail accessibility checks every year. Six error categories cause 96% of failures. All six are decisions made before a single line of code is written.

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Accessibility · Jul 2026 · 9 min

AA vs AAA: what these levels actually mean and why your disabled button is failing both

WCAG's three conformance levels, how the contrast ratio is really calculated, and where AAA is the true minimum, including the disabled button state most design systems get wrong.

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Accessibility · Jul 2026 · 8 min

What is ARIA and why product designers need to understand it

ARIA roles, states, and properties explained for product designers: the first rule of ARIA, the patterns you'll actually touch, and how to document interactive behavior so developers implement it right.

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Accessibility · Jul 2026 · 8 min

Designing for color blindness: why red and green are never enough

The real taxonomy of color vision deficiency, why red/green pairs collapse first, the second-channel rule, and how to audit an existing design system for color-only failures.

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Accessibility · Jul 2026 · 9 min

Keyboard navigation: how to test your product without touching the mouse

Tab order, focus indicators, focus management inside modals, and the skip link, with the real WCAG success criteria behind each one and a two-minute test any designer can run.

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