Resources
These are resources I come back to often. Not because they’re trendy, but because they’ve earned their place. Whether it’s designing inclusive interfaces, working with systems, or trying to make sense of AI, each one offers something useful, considered, or perspective-shifting. Good for sharing when people ask.
Accessibility & inclusive design
Thoughtful takes on how to make things that work for more people, not just meet a spec.
- Inclusive Components
- Practical, deep explorations of accessible UI patterns by Heydon Pickering
- An introduction to APCA
- The future of colour contrast? I hope so.
- Amy Hupe – Sharing Research in Design Systems
- Shows how research can shape more empathetic, inclusive systems
- WAI Perspectives videos
- Short explainers that help frame accessibility as a design and human rights issue
Design systems & scalable thinking
Not just components — the stuff behind the stuff.
- EightShapes – Tokens in Design Systems
- A foundational read on where tokens fit
- Alla Kholmatova – Design Systems
- The book that taught me to look beyond UI kits
- Design system documentation made using Zeroheight
- Real-world examples of system documentation done well
Content, language & systems of understanding
Because design is also how you explain things, not just how you shape them.
- GOV.UK Content Style Guide
- Clarity, not cleverness
- Dropbox’s writing principles
- For voice, tone, and calm communication
- Every Layout
- A quietly radical way to think about layout systems and the web
- Ethical Design Guide
- Tools and frameworks for designing with care
Artificial Intelligence & Large Language Models
Thinking through the hype: how to work with AI and LLMs in a way that supports creativity and inclusion.
- The UK Government's Incubator for Artificial Intelligence
- The AI Playbook for the UK Government
- Sean Savage – AI Pace Layers
- An interesting metaphor for how to think about AI’s layers of change
- Norman Nielsen Group – Accessibility in the Age of AI
- Covers both risks and opportunities
- Inclusive AI Design Toolkit
- Co-created with disability advocacy groups, focuses on creative tools
- Stanford HAI – Disability, Bias, and AI
- A primer on ableism in algorithmic systems
- AI Design Principles by Google PAIR
- A good starting point for generative toolmakers
- Transactions on Machine Learning Research survey output
- A curated list of language modeling researches for code (and other software engineering activities), plus related datasets
- Artificial Analysis' LLM Leaderboard
- Comparison and ranking the performance of over 30 LLM models