Casabianca
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Updated weekly · 10 posts

The journal — what I'm learning, written down.

Articles on product design and craft, hands-on tutorials, and longer-form Foundations pieces I write to teach what I wish someone had taught me. Mostly for designers learning to ship and engineers learning to draw.

Articles
4
Tutorials
2
Foundations
3
Reads / month
12.4k
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FeaturedArticleMay 2026 · 8 min

Why your design system isn't being used

A practical look at adoption, and why having a design system is rarely the real problem.

Design systems
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Editor's picks

Top reads this month.

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JP Casabiancain The Briefing

Build a Stripe-style sparkline in 80 lines of SVG

From normalization math to area gradients and smooth metric morphs.

TutorialMay 202614 min0.8k
01
JP Casabiancain The Briefing

Foundations: thinking in design tokens

A primer for designers and engineers new to design tokens, with exercises.

FoundationsApr 202622 min1.5k
02
JP Casabiancain The Briefing

Three quick rules for empty states

Empty is not blank. It is an opportunity.

NoteJan 20263 min2.2k
03
JP Casabiancain The Briefing

My Claude Code PR workflow

How I use AI agents for repo inspection, implementation, verification, and pull requests without skipping engineering judgment.

ArticleJun 20267 min2.9k
04
JP Casabiancain The Briefing

A practical naming guide for Figma variables

A small system for naming primitives, semantic tokens, component variables, and modes so design and code can stay aligned.

FoundationsJun 20268 min3.6k
05
JP Casabiancain The Briefing

Vue 2 to Vue 3 migration notes from product work

The migration risks I watch for: component contracts, reactivity assumptions, plugins, tests, and design-system drift.

ArticleJun 20267 min4.3k
06
Everything
Tutorial
May 2026
Build a Stripe-style sparkline in 80 lines of SVG
From normalization math to area gradients and smooth metric morphs.
Front-end
14 min
Foundations
Apr 2026
Foundations: thinking in design tokens
A primer for designers and engineers new to design tokens, with exercises.
Design systems
22 min
Note
Jan 2026
Three quick rules for empty states
Empty is not blank. It is an opportunity.
UX
3 min
Article
Jun 2026
My Claude Code PR workflow
How I use AI agents for repo inspection, implementation, verification, and pull requests without skipping engineering judgment.
AI workflow
7 min
Foundations
Jun 2026
A practical naming guide for Figma variables
A small system for naming primitives, semantic tokens, component variables, and modes so design and code can stay aligned.
Design systems
8 min
Article
Jun 2026
Vue 2 to Vue 3 migration notes from product work
The migration risks I watch for: component contracts, reactivity assumptions, plugins, tests, and design-system drift.
Front-end
7 min
Tutorial
Jun 2026
A Supabase-backed static CMS starter for Astro
How this site uses Supabase as a small content backend while still deploying as a fast static Astro site.
Supabase
8 min
Article
Jun 2026
What makes an API spec agent-ready
A practical checklist for API descriptions, examples, auth, side effects, errors, and Postman collections that AI agents can use safely.
APIs
7 min
Foundations
Jun 2026
How I structure a design tokens starter
A starter model for primitives, semantic tokens, component tokens, CSS variables, and handoff documentation.
Design systems
6 min
Series

Longer-form journeys.

Multi-part guides I'm building over time. Subscribe and I'll send the next chapter when it lands.

Series · 6 parts
Foundations

A weekly series for designers learning the engineering side.

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Series · 4 parts
Shipping Cartkit

How a small team rebuilt commerce checkout, in the open.

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Series · 3 parts
Sketch / Ship

Weekend prototypes from sketch to live site.

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