It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
The team at Stripe explores how they’re refining their color palette to make it more accessible and legible for users across all their products and interfaces. Not only that but the team built a wonderful and yet entirely bonkers app for figuring out the ideal range of colors that they needed.
… Read articleWe built a web interface to allow us to visualize and manipulate our color system using perceptually uniform color models. The tool gave us an immediate feedback loop while
Here’s a new book by Andrew Couldwell all about design systems and I'm looking forward to reading the book because it looks like his experience will offer a bunch of insightful thoughts and advice.… Read article
I woke up one morning and realized that I had it all wrong. I discovered that code and design are unable to solve every problem on a design systems team, even if many problems can be solved by coding and designing in a dark room all day. Wait, huh? How on earth does that make any sense? Well, that’s because good design systems work is about hiring, too.… Read article
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:
… Read articleSince rolling out our new and improved drop caps, we’ve continued to iterate on them. (Including fixing a number
This post covers how I built a typography grid for a design system using Vue render functions. Here’s the demo and the code. I used render functions because they allow you to create HTML with a greater level of control than regular Vue templates, yet surprisingly I couldn’t find very much when I web searched around for real-life, non-tutorial applications of them. I’m hoping this post will fill that void and provide a helpful and practical use case … Read article
Specific design systems, I mean. Design systems, as a concept, are something just about any site can benefit from.
A lot of hype goes into design systems these days. Just the other day, an organization's published their design system publicly and I got a slew of DMs, emails, and Slack messages encouraging me to check it out. "Looks good to me," I said. But I'm merely knocking on the hood of a new car, so to speak. I haven't sat … Read article
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:
… Read articleSystems that try to contain complexity over long periods of time by convention
In my experience working with design systems, I’ve found that I have to sacrifice my portfolio to do it well. Unlike a lot of other design work where it’s relatively easy to present Dribbble-worthy interfaces and designs, I fear that systems are quite a bit trickier than that.
You could make things beautiful, but the best work that happens on a design systems team often isn’t beautiful. In fact, a lot of the best work isn’t even visible.… Read article