- Know where you stand before starting the journey
- Make sure everyone is speaking the same language
- Integrate the right tools into your team’s workflow
Whenever I confront a design system problem, I ask myself this one question that guides the way: “What would HTML do?”
HTML is the ultimate composable language. With just a few elements shuffled together you can create wildly different interfaces. And that’s really where all the power from HTML comes up: everything has one job, does it really well (ideally), which makes the possible options almost infinite.
Design systems should hope for the same.
Okay, if you weren’t already excited for Patterns Day, get a load of what Rich is going to be talking about!
You’ve got your ticket, right?
Here’s an aggregator of components from multiple design systems.
Call me Cassandra:
The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing similar concerns. In the words of Jeremy Keith:
[…] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.
So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality.
This grim assessment is well worth a read. It rings very true.
What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the “output” is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce “free” iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!
A library of UX components is one common part of a design system, but the system itself is something bigger. A good system is also a shared set of strategies for solving visual and interactive communication challenges, a playbook rather than a script.
I like this way of putting it:
The problem is that treating a design system as a pantry full of widgets is, in and of itself, a failure of both craft and imagination. Think of it like a language: if a writer’s only engagement with it is grabbing words from the dictionary and heaping them together until “message” is achieved, things are going to suck. Language is more than a bag of words.
There’s probably a Pace Layer analogy in here somewhere.
Design systems are neither good nor bad (nor are they neutral).
A presentation at An Event Apart San Francisco 2019
From pattern portfolios to Fractal.
Gotta keep ‘em separated.