The Gov.uk design system is looking very, very good indeed—nicely organised with plenty of usage guidelines for every component.
Guidance on using components and patterns now follow a simple, consistent format based on task-based research into what users need in order to follow and trust an approach.
Every UI control you roll yourself is a liability. You have to design it, test it, ship it, document it, debug it, maintain it — the list goes on.
It makes you wonder why we insist on rolling (or styling) our own common UI controls so often. Perhaps we’d be better off asking: What are the fewest amount of components we have to build to deliver value to our users?
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.
Robin describes his experience of using a design system, having previously been one of the people making and enforcing a design system:
However it’s only now as a product designer that I realize just how much I want the design system to carefully guide me instead of brute-forcing its decisions onto my work. I want to fall into the loving embrace of the system because I don’t wanna have to think about hex values or button sizes or box shadows. I don’t want to rethink padding and margins or rethink the grid each time I design a page.
But by golly if a design system says “no” to me then I will do my very best to blow it up.
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?
When you think of heraldry what comes to mind is probably knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, jousting, that sort of thing. Medieval stuff. But I prefer to think of it as one of the earliest design systems.
This totally checks out.
There’s probably a Pace Layer analogy in here somewhere.
A presentation at An Event Apart San Francisco 2019
A presentation at An Event Apart San Francisco 2019
For your viewing and listening pleasure.
Oh, what a Patterns Day that was!