Articles Tagged design systems

I had a little rant in me a few months ago about design systems: "Who Are Design Systems For?" My main point was that there are so many public and open source ones out there that choosing one can feel like choosing new furniture for your house. You just measure up what you need and what you like and pick one. But it just isn't that simple. Some are made for you, some makers want you to use them… Read article

Here’s a fascinating look at The Guardian’s design system with a step-by-step breakdown of what's gone into it and what options are available to designers and developers. It shows us how the team treats colors, typography, layouts, and visual cues like rules and borders.… Read article

Ethan Marcotte has written up his process for how to make drop caps accessible for screen readers and browsers alike. All of that is very interesting and I’m sure I’ll use a technique like this in the near future, but the part that made me hop out of my seat is where Ethan notes his experience with design systems at Vox:

Since rolling out our new and improved drop caps, we’ve continued to iterate on them. (Including fixing a number

Have you ever created a well-intentioned, thoughtful design system only to watch it grow into an ever-increasing and scary codebase? I've been working in sort of the opposite direction, inheriting the scary codebase and trying to create a thoughtful system from it.

Here's Alex Sanders on the topic, explaining how his team at The Guardian has tackled the task of creating design systems while combating complexity:

Systems that try to contain complexity over long periods of time by convention

I really enjoyed this post by Dan Abramov. He defines his work as a UI engineer and I especially like what he writes about his learning experience:

My biggest learning breakthroughs weren’t about a particular technology. Rather, I learned the most when I struggled to solve a particular UI problem. Sometimes, I would later discover libraries or patterns that helped me. In other cases, I’d come up with my own solutions (both good and bad ones).

It’s this combination of

Dependencies in JavaScript are pretty straightforward. I can't write library.doThing() unless library exists. If library changes in some fundamental way, things break and hopefully our tests catch it.

Dependencies in CSS can be a bit more abstract. Robin just wrote in our newsletter how the styling from certain classes (e.g. position: absolute) can depend on the styling from other classes (e.g. position: relative) and how that can be — at best — obtuse sometimes.

Design has dependencies too, … Read article

My pal Lindsay Grizzard wrote about creating a CSS system that works across an organization and all of the things to keep in mind when starting a new project:

Getting other developers and designers to use the standardized rules is essential. When starting a project, get developers onboard with your CSS, JS and even HTML conventions from the start. Meet early and often to discuss every library, framework, mental model, and gem you are interested in using and take feedback