Ben Conolly

Writer who has moved from writing fiction to writing code. Delights in delightedness.

Find Ben on

• GitHub

On design systems legibility

A design system that nobody can understand is a design system nobody can use. This is why good documentation is so key to having a well-used and well-loved design system. Noviny walks you through two of Atlassian’s documentation sites for the company-wide design system & component library Atlaskit, showing how the content is built and written, and the practical steps you can take immediately to tackle the hard problems around large documentation projects.

• January 2019

More posts from other Thinkmill voices

• Designing beyond the median user
  For seventy years software has shipped one shape to every user. The confluence of design systems, headless platforms, and agent-native exposure has coalesced to make that constraint optional. A retrospective of the median-user problem and the new architectural horizon now opening.
  June 2026 ·10 min read

• What engineering teams owe for the AI speed boost
  AI-assisted development genuinely accelerated engineering teams, but many organisations stopped at the velocity gains and ignored the accumulating debt. The costs: code nobody fully understands, weakened code review culture, bloated dependency trees, and architectural decisions made without real judgement about tradeoffs...
  May 2026 ·4 min read

• A behavioural framework for the monsters in your team
  The AI in Design 2026 report captures a profession mid-mutation. The "Frankenjob" label the coverage put on it misses the seam where the real work happens.
  May 2026 ·5 min read