Link tags: consistency

Robin Rendle — The Other Side

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.

Updating GOV.UK’s crown - Inside GOV.UK

“Make the logo bi… exactly the same size.”

You know when a new boss takes over a company and the first thing they do is declare an immediate rebranding? It turns out that the monarchy has been doing that for generations.

What is Utility-First CSS?: HeydonWorks

Heydon does a very good job of explaining why throwing away the power of selectors makes no sense.

Utility-first detractors complain a lot about how verbose this is and, consequently, how ugly. And it is indeed. But you’d forgive it that if it actually solved a problem, which it doesn’t. It is unequivocally an inferior way of making things which are alike look alike, as you should. It is and can only be useful for reproducing inconsistent design, wherein all those repeated values would instead differ.

He’s also right on the nose in explaining why something as awful at Tailwind could get so popular:

But CSS isn’t new, it’s only good. And in this backwards, bullshit-optimized economy of garbage and nonsense, good isn’t bad enough.

Craft vs Industry: Separating Concerns by Thomas Michael Semmler: CSS Developer, Designer & Developer from Vienna, Austria

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!

Cole Peters — An Introduction to Constraint Based Design Systems

Design systems as codified constraints.

CSS Stats

A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:

CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.

Fussy Web, True Meaning. · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Websites are primarily seen as functional software, built to fulfill a business objective and to reach quantifiable goals. The field of user experience is obsessed with KPIs, jobs-to-be-done, optimized user flows, and conversion rates. And in quest of ever more efficient processes – and in the spirit of true modernists –, design and development teams try to standardize solutions into reusable templates and components, streamlined pattern libraries, and scalable design systems.

Through a design system, darkly. — Ethan Marcotte

1. Design systems haven’t “solved” inconsistency. Rather, they’ve shifted how and when it manifests.
2. Many design systems have introduced another, deeper issue: a problem of visibility.

Ethan makes the case that it’s time we stopped taking a pattern-led approach to design systems and start taking a process-led approach. I agree. I think there’s often more emphasis on the “design” than the “system”.

Breaking looms by Matthew Ström

Another follow-on to my post about design systems and automation. Here, Matthew invokes the spirit of the much-misunderstood Luddite martyrs. It’s good stuff.

Design systems are used by greedy software companies to fatten their bottom line. UI kits replace skilled designers with cheap commoditized labor.

Agile practices pressure teams to deliver more and faster. Scrum underscores soulless feature factories that suck the joy from the craft of software development.

But progress requires more than breaking looms.

Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization | Brad Frost

Brad weighs in on what I wrote about design systems and automation. He rightly points out that the issue isn’t with any particular tool—and a design system is, after all, a tool—but rather with the culture and processes of the organisation.

Sure, design systems have the ability to dehumanize and that’s something to actively watch out for. But I’d also say to pay close attention to the processes and organizational culture we take part in and contribute to.

There’s a full-on rant here about the dehumanising effects of what’s called “agile” at scale:

I’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.

The design systems we swim in. — Ethan Marcotte

But a design system that optimizes for consistency relies on compliance: specifically, the people using the system have to comply with the system’s rules, in order to deliver on that promised consistency. And this is why that, as a way of doing something, a design system can be pretty dehumanizing.

Ethan shares his thoughts on what I wrote about design systems and automation. He offers this test on whether a design system is empowering or disempowering:

Does the system you work with allow you to control the process of your work, to make situational decisions? Or is it simply a set of rules you have to follow?

How using component-based design helps us build faster

A case study from Twitter on the benefits of using a design system:

With component-based design, development becomes an act of composition, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.

I think that could be boiled down to this:

Component-based design favours composition over invention.

I’m not saying that’s good. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m also not saying it’s neutral.

The Elements of UI Engineering - Overreacted

These are good challenges to think about. Almost all of them are user-focused, and there’s a refreshing focus away from reaching for a library:

It’s tempting to read about these problems with a particular view library or a data fetching library in mind as a solution. But I encourage you to pretend that these libraries don’t exist, and read again from that perspective. How would you approach solving these issues?

Beyond style guides: lessons from scaling design at TELUS

I like the questions that the TELUS team ask about any potential components to be added to their design system:

1. Is it on brand?
2. Is it accessible?
3. Has it been tested?
4. Can it be reused?

They also have design principles.

5 ways having a shared design system has helped us ship our designs faster – Product at Canva

The steps that the Canva team took to turbocharge their design ops.

I’ll talk about why creating a shared design system has boosted our organizational productivity—and how you can help your teams improve product quality while reducing your company’s ‘design debt’.

18F: Digital service delivery | Building a large-scale design system: How we created a design system for the U.S. government

Maya Benari provides an in-depth walkthrough of 18F’s mission to create a consistent design system for many, many different government sites.

When building out a large-scale design system, it can be hard to know where to start. By focusing on the basics, from core styles to coding conventions to design principles, you can create a strong foundation that spreads to different parts of your team.

There’s an interface inventory, then mood boards, then the work starts on typography and colour, then white space, and finally the grid system.

The lessons learned make for good design principles:

• Talk to the people
• Look for duplication of efforts
• Know your values
• Empower your team
• Start small and iterate
• Don’t work in a vacuum
• Reuse and specialize
• Promote your system
• Be flexible

A Cohesive & Unified Identity for British Government — Paul Robert Lloyd

In search of typographical consistency in government departments.