Articles Tagged design systems

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

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

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

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 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