Design systems can often ‘read’ as very top down, but need to be bottom up to reflect the needs of different users of different services in different contexts.
I’ve yet to be involved in a design system that hasn’t struggled to some extent for participation and contribution from the whole of its design community.
I like the questions that the TELUS team ask about any potential components to be added to their design system:
- Is it on brand?
- Is it accessible?
- Has it been tested?
- Can it be reused?
They also have design principles.
- 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
This looks like a really good (and free!) online book all about design ops.
(Alas, it is, once again, driven by janky JavaScript that makes it a bit of a chore to scroll and read.)
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’.
I really like the way that this pattern library includes research insights to provide justification for design decisions.
Almost every technological innovation over the last 300 years has had side effects which actually increase the number of opportunities for employment. The general trend is that the easier something is to do, the more demand there is for it.
Cameron looks at the historical effects of automation and applies that to design systems. The future he sees is one of increased design democratisation and participation.
This is actually something that designers have been championing for decades – inclusive design at all levels of the company, and an increase in design thinking at all stages of product development. Now that we finally have a chance of achieving that it’s not a time to be scared. It’s a time to be celebrated.
Susan writes about the challenges when trying to get widespread adoption of a design system. Spoiler: the challenges aren’t technical.
Change is hard. Communication and collaboration are absolutely necessary to make a system work. And the more people you can get involved from various disciplines the better chance you have of maintaining your system.
A step-by-step account of trying to find a way to keep Sketch files in sync with the code in a pattern library. The solution came from HTML Sketchapp, a more agnostic spiritual successor to AirBnB’s React Sketchapp.
The contract was incredibly straightforward—as long as you generated HTML, you could import it into Sketch.
After some tinkering, Mark Dalgleish came up with a command line tool to automate the creation of Sketch libraries from HTML elements with data-sketch- attributes.
A great round-up of Leading Design—one of the best events I attended in 2017.
Great advice from Una on getting buy-in and ensuring the long-term success of a design system.
A great in-depth report from Alice on creating, running, and most importantly, selling an in-house design system. This makes a great companion piece to her Patterns Day talk.
Where internal teams seem to go wrong is not appreciating that the thing they’re building is still a product and so it needs to compete with other products on the market.
A collection of publicly available design systems, pattern libraries, and interface guidelines.