Articles Tagged design systems

Jules Forrest discusses some of the work that her team at Credit Karma has been up to when it comes to design systems. Jules writes:

...in most engineering organizations, you spend your whole first day setting up your development environment so you can actually ship code. It’s generally pretty tedious and no one likes doing it, but it’s this thing you do to contribute meaningful work to production. Which got me thinking, what would it look like to make it

The team at Figma has created a new resource for “learning, creating and evangelizing design systems” called Design Systems that already has a good collection of interviews and articles by some folks thinking about these things.

I particularly liked Jeroen Ransijn’s post on how to convince your company it’s ready for a design system, where he writes:

Building a design system is not about reaching a single point in time. It’s an ongoing process of learning, building, evangelizing and driving

Heydon Pickering looks into how to give a React component a certain heading (like <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, etc.) depending on its context and thereby ensure that the DOM is still perfectly accessible for screen readers. Why is using the right heading important though? Heydon writes in the intro:

One thing that keeps coming back to me, in research, testing, and everyday conversation with colleagues and friends, is just how important headings are. For screen reader users, headings describe the

Brad frost picks up the ongoing conversation about design systems. Where many posts seem to center on how to create one and how to enforce it, the big takeaway here is that design systems are not synonymous with constraints. They're only as strict as we make them and new CSS features like custom properties actually open up new creative possibilities—something Andres Galante and Cliff Pyles recently pitched right here on CSS-Tricks.

Brad:

The aesthetic layer is often the most malleable

We talk a lot about Vue around here, including some practical applications of it, but haven't gotten deep into designing for it. In this post, Viljami Salminen describes his Vue design process and the thinking that led him to build the Vue Design System:

A design system can help establish a common vocabulary between everyone in an organization and ease the collabo­ration between different disciplines. I’ve seen it go the other way around too when important decisions have been