Skip to main content
CSS is fun and cool and I like it.

Articles Tagged design systems

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
25 Articles
{
,

}
Article

People Problems

Avatar of Robin Rendle
Author
Robin Rendle
6 Comments
Join Conversation

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 of the continuum, you’ve got technical issues. These can be solved with technical solutions. On the other end of the continuum, you’ve got human issues. These can be solved with discussions, agreement, empathy, and conversations (often dreaded or awkward).

I

… Read article “People Problems”
Article

The Best Design System Tool is Slack

Avatar of Robin Rendle
Author
Robin Rendle

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 tool to document our components? How should that tie into Figma or Sketch? What about written documentation? Should we invest a lot of time into making a giant Polaris-like wiki of how to build things?

The issue with all these … Read article “The Best Design System Tool is Slack”

Article

How to build a bad design system

Avatar of Robin Rendle
Author
Robin Rendle

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 many dang opinions.

Is there a conversation about the color of your buttons that’s taking place? Great! Everyone needs a consistent set of colors so that users know what to click and so that designers don’t have to choose from … Read article “How to build a bad design system”

Link

Sass !default and themeable design systems

Avatar of Robin Rendle
Shared by
Robin Rendle

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
}
… Read article “Sass !default and themeable design systems”
Our Notes   /   Read at bradfrost.com
Link

Making Room for Variation

Avatar of Chris Coyier
Shared by
Chris Coyier

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 kinds of deviations that come up in a design
system:

  • Unintentional divergence typically happens when designers can’t find the information they’re looking for. They may not know that a certain solution exists within a system, so they create their own
… Read article “Making Room for Variation”
Our Notes   /   Read at alistapart.com
Article

Two Lessons I Learned From Making React Components

Avatar of Robin Rendle
Author
Robin Rendle

Here’s a couple of lessons I’ve learned about how not to build React components. These are things I’ve come across over the past couple of months and thought they might be of interest to you if you’re working on a design system, especially one with a bunch of legacy technical decisions and a lot of tech debt under the hood.… Read article “Two Lessons I Learned From Making React Components”

Link

Design APIs: The Evolution of Design Systems

Avatar of Chris Coyier
Shared by
Chris Coyier

A clever idea from Matthew Ström:

[…] design APIs don’t seem like a stretch of the imagination. An API-driven approach is the natural extension of the work currently being done on design systems, including tokens and standardization projects.

If you buy into the idea of design tokens, that expresses itself as a chunk of JSON with things like colors and spacing values. No reason an API couldn’t deliver that, potentially empowering a build process that pulls the most recent … Read article “Design APIs: The Evolution of Design Systems”

Our Notes   /   Read at matthewstrom.com
Link

Designing accessible color systems

Avatar of Robin Rendle
Shared by
Robin Rendle

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.

We 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

… Read article “Designing accessible color systems”
Our Notes   /   Read at stripe.com
Link

Laying the Foundations

Avatar of Robin Rendle
Shared by
Robin Rendle

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 “Laying the Foundations”

Our Notes   /   Read at designsystemfoundations.com
Article

A Codebase and a Community

Avatar of Robin Rendle
Author
Robin Rendle

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 “A Codebase and a Community”