Design systems are an entire job these days. Agencies are hired to create them. In-house teams are formed to handle them, shipping them so that other teams can use them and helping ensure they do. Design systems aren’t a fad, …
Say you’ve got a <Card /> component. It’s highly likely it shouldn’t be butted right up against any other components with no spacing around it. That’s true for… pretty much every component. So, how do you handle component spacing in …
One of the toughest things about being someone who cares deeply about design systems is making the case for a dedicated design system. Folks in leadership will often ask you to prove the value of it. Why should we care …
One way to work with Custom Properties is to think of them as design tokens. Colors, spacings, fonts, and whatnot. You set them at the root of the page and use them throughout your CSS. Very useful, and the classic …
My friends at Sparkbox are doing a survey on design systems, as they do each year. Go ahead and fill it out if you please. Here are the results from last year. In both 2019 and 2020, the vibe was …
Here’s a fabulous post by Vitaly Friedman that looks at how to make accessible front-end components and what problems there are today when it comes to building them.…
Just the other day, Jeremy Keith wrote that problems with performance work isn’t only a matter of optimization and fixing code, but also tackling people problems:
…It struck me that there’s a continuum of performance challenges. On one end
There’s a series of questions I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. The questions have to do with design systems work: Where should we document things? Do we make a separate app? Do we use a third-party …
I didn’t realize this until it was far too late, but one of the biggest mistakes that’s made on a design systems team is a common mismanagement issue: there are too many people in a meeting and they have too …
This is a great blog post from Brad Frost where he walks us through an interesting example. Let’s say we’re making a theme and we have some Sass like this:
.c-text-input {
background-color: $form-background-color;
padding: 10px
}Say you have a design system and you’re having a moment where it doesn’t have what you need. You need to diverge and create something new. Yesenia Perez-Cruz categorizes these moments from essentially ooops to niiice:
…There are three
