Elizabet Hyliuk is Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer at Merge Rocks. Her work connects design principles with the standards and ownership behind product and UX decisions.
In her essay on whether agencies need design principles, Elizabet examines why those principles need to influence real choices rather than remain abstract statements. She considers how a design team can use them to clarify responsibility and create a shared basis for judging options.
Her areas of focus include design leadership, agency design operations, product and UX decision-making, and design systems. She writes for founders, product leaders, and design teams that need to maintain a clear direction while several contributors shape a product. Her perspective centres on the operating decisions behind consistent design: how standards are understood, who is responsible for applying them, and whether they change the way a team works in practice. The goal is to make design principles useful in real trade-offs, not merely present in a document.
