design systems

Brad frost picks up the ongoing conversation about design systems. Where many posts seem to center on how to create one and how to enforce it, the big takeaway here is that design systems are not synonymous with constraints. They're only as strict as we make them and new CSS features like custom properties actually open up new creative possibilities—something Andres Galante and Cliff Pyles recently pitched right here on CSS-Tricks.

Brad:

The aesthetic layer is often the most malleable layer of the frontend stack, which means that we can create systems that allow for a lot of aesthetic flexibility while still retaining a solid underlying structural foundation.

This not only sounds right, but puts a strong punctuation on why we love CSS: it's a set of styles that can be applied an infinite number of ways to the same HTML markup. A new layer of paint can be slapped on at any time, but the beams, walls and ceiling of the building can remain constant. Dave Rupert's personal site is a prime example of this and he details his approach to theming.

Ah, CSS Zen Garden...

We talk a lot about Vue around here, including some practical applications of it, but haven't gotten deep into designing for it. In this post, Viljami Salminen describes his Vue design process and the thinking that led him to build the Vue Design System:

A design system can help establish a common vocabulary between everyone in an organization and ease the collabo­ration between different disciplines. I’ve seen it go the other way around too when important decisions have been made in a rush. To avoid that, Vue Design System introduces the following framework for naming that I’ve found working well in the past...

Viljami lists Design Principles, Tokens, Elements, Patterns, and Templates as the way in which he structures a system and I think it’s a pretty interesting approach and a parallel to Lucas Lemonnier's post on creating design systems in Sketch, using Atomic Design as the structure. I particularly like how Viljami fits everything together in the example style guide that’s provided.