Paper UI

Paper UI was the design system I built in 2018, in my apartment, in Vue, because I'd read the Lonely Planet on design systems and wanted to see the country.

It had thirty-eight components. Sixteen of them were buttons. The color tokens were named after Pantone chips. The typography scale had been chosen by ear from a coffee-shop printout. The README opened with the word philosophy: and contained two paragraphs I now find unbearable to read. It was, in retrospect, exactly the wrong thing built exactly the right way.

I put it on the internet, wrote a blog post that got more attention than the project deserved, and three weeks later was on a Zoom with a Squarespace recruiter who had read the post and not the source.

Paper UI is on this page because every design system I've worked on since has been a quiet argument with it. The naming was wrong in a way that taught me about naming. The component-boundary lines were wrong in a way that taught me about component boundaries. The breakpoint scheme broke at 767px in a way that taught me to never trust a breakpoint someone else didn't suffer for.

I keep the repo public mostly out of stubbornness. If you go look at it, do me one favor: read the first commit, not the last. The first commit is the only one that's honest about what I knew at the time.