Design Attractors

October 2, 2025

Illustration of a wide-eyed lemur next to the text "Design Attractors" on a red banner, with "blog.damato.design" and the D’Amato logo below

This is what I call a design attractor. In chaos theory, an attractor is the stable state toward which a system evolves over time. In design, for a button to be a button, it must also be interactive. This is a design attractor. From there, users expect some visual treatment to distinguish it from non-interactive elements. Exactly what that treatment looks like depends on the local agreements within an organization, but once settled, that’s another design attractor.

Source: Design Attractors

Don D’Amato here uses the analogy of complex systems to get a better understanding of how design systems adapt and evolve.