MASSIMO — a design system builder, paused for the most useful reason
I already had a visual language for my own work. Could the same discipline be turned into something repeatable — a way to stand up a design system for any brand, and then produce real pieces against it instead of eyeballing every post?
The system works. What didn't work was me. Feeding a brand's tokens in by dictation — colour by colour, size by size — is tedious in a way that no amount of good architecture fixes, and tedium is a design flaw, not a personal failing. I'd built something correct that I didn't want to use.
Paused deliberately after one full client system and a near-finished campaign piece. It produces on demand, but I stopped feeding it. The honest lesson: a tool that depends on a boring ritual will lose to the sloppy method you'll actually repeat.
What it is
MASSIMO does two jobs. It builds a design system for a brand — colour, type, scale, formats, assets — and then produces finished communication pieces against it: social posts, stories, web headers, product listings. The point is that a piece is never designed from scratch; it's assembled from decisions already made.
It's named after Massimo Vignelli, whose position I keep coming back to: a small number of elements, used with discipline, beats endless variety. The name doubles as the checklist the system runs before anything ships.
The four layers
A system that only defines colours isn't a system. Each brand gets:
- Tokens — the atoms. Colour, typeface, the modular scale, spacing.
- Formats — the real pixel dimensions of every place the brand appears, kept in a living sheet because platforms change their specs without telling anyone.
- Assets — logos, marks, imagery, in the states they're actually needed.
- Rules — what you may and may not do with the above.
The rule I'm most glad I set
Any decision without a token gets flagged, never quietly invented.
If a piece needs a colour or a size the system doesn't define, it ships marked as an open question rather than silently filled in with something plausible. This is the difference between a system and a mood board. Systems that let you improvise "just this once" stop being systems within a month.
Everything documented ships in both Spanish and English, as separate files. My team works mostly in English; I think in Spanish. Pretending one of those isn't true creates work later.
Why it's paused
Here's the part worth writing down.
The build loop worked like this: I'd read a brand's values off a template — this teal, that weight, this corner radius — the system would apply them, and I'd check the result visually. Mechanically sound. It produced a complete system for a client brand and a campaign piece that got to about 90% finished.
And I stopped, because the dictation loop was miserable. Reading tokens aloud one at a time is data entry with extra steps. I'd built something that was correct and that I didn't want to open.
I could frame that as a discipline problem. I don't think it is. If a tool depends on a ritual you dread, the ritual is the bug. The realistic fix isn't more willpower — it's absorbing tokens as they show up in real work, when a decision is being made anyway, instead of front-loading an entire system in one sitting.
So it sits in a deliberate pause: it produces on demand, but I've stopped feeding it in batches. That's a better state than pretending it's active.
What it changed anyway
Even paused, it moved something. The NASApunk design system I'd built for my own work was a document. MASSIMO forced the question of what happens when you hand that document to someone else and they need a post by Thursday. Those are different problems, and I hadn't seen it until I tried to generalise.