Nathan Curtis
Founder and design systems consultant at Directed Edges. He’s passionate about information architecture, UX, front-end dev and design systems. He wrote Modular Web Design in 2009, blogs frequently on Medium.com today, and speaks regularly at events worldwide.
Components as Data for Humans and Machines
Wed 15th – 10:30
AI has pushed design systems to improve the structure, precision, and durability of their core asset: the UI components catalog. System users expect components to be produced fast, evolve predictably, and work consistently across platforms. In this talk, Nathan will reflect on his past year architecting component specifications as a platform-agnostic source-of-truth separate from any single implementation (including Figma). Components aren’t defined in any one tool, implementation, or visual; instead, they are an intent recorded as data and managed through a lifecycle.
In this talk, Nathan will cover how he translates design intent out of Figma by modeling component anatomy, props, layout and styles as structured data. He will outline the principles for designing a component schema that machines love—one that is deterministic, complete, and succinct—and how teams use Architecture Decision Records to discover and evolve the schema that works for them.
Attendees will see data-driven workflows that leverage and feed AI yet remain relevant for designers and dev collaboration too. This includes using AI to plan and analyze legacy assets across platforms (iOS, Android, and Web) and the back-and-forth between data and Figma design activity to get components right. Nathan will describe how machine-readable specs are used for generating cross-platform code and analyzing visual and API consistency by reflecting on client experiences. Finally, Nathan will detail the evolution of Figma plugin, command line and MCP tools into a robust engine to produce and version specs over time.
Nathan will also give a workshop on Design Systems; Architecting Component Anatomy, Props and Slots!
🔌 Tokens, Tools, and Total Chaos
Wed 15th – 11:50
Main Stage
Design systems are supposed to make our lives easier, but building them can be a headache. Nathan and T.J. are sitting down to chat about what’s actually working in the world of tokens and AI — and what’s just hype. They’ll be talking about bridging the gap between design and code without losing your mind. Struggling with a messy library or a specific component? Add your system questions to the board for the guys to tackle.
- On the web
- https://www.directededges.com
- On LinkedIn
- nathancurtis