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Debating complexity is pointless because it’s a subjective metric. Every developer has a different gut feeling about simplicity, complexity and the appropriate amount of complexity for a given task. When people try to find an objective definition, they come to wildly different results. And that’s okay.

Instead, we should focus on hard metrics from a user perspective. Performance, efficiency, compatibility, accessibility and fault-tolerance can be measured, tested and evaluated, automatically and manually.

Any amount of complexity is fine as long as these goals are met.

Information Architecture First Principles | Jorge Arango

• People only understand things relative to things they already understand
• People only understand things in context
• People rely on patterns and consistency
• People seek to minimize cognitive load
• People have varying levels of expertise and familiarity
• People are goal-oriented
• People often don’t know what they’re looking for
• Information is more useful when it’s actionable

Should this be a map or 500 maps? - by Elan Ullendorff

This is kind of about art direction and kind of about design systems.

There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.

My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all.

What would HTML do? - The Cascade

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.

HTMX Is So Cool I Rolled My Own! – David Bushell – Freelance Web Design (UK)

Call it HTMLX or call it Hijax, what matters isn’t the code so much as the idea:

Front-end JavaScript fatigue is real. I’m guilty myself of over-engineering JS UI despite preferring good old server templates. I don’t even think HTMX is that good but the philosophy behind it embarrasses the modern JavaScript developer. For that I appreciate it very much.

Invisible success – Eric Bailey

Snook’s Law in action:

Big, flashy things get noticed. Quiet, boring things don’t.

There isn’t much infrastructure in place to quantify the constant, silent, boring, predictable, round-the-clock passive successes of this aspect of design systems after the initial effort is complete.

A lack of bug reports, accessibility issues, design tweaks, etc. are all objectively great, but there are no easy datapoints you can measure here.

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.

Patternsday 2024 – Photos by Marc Thiele

Lovely photos by Marc from Patterns Day!

Patterns Day Patterns | Trys Mudford

Trys threads the themes of Patterns Day together:

Jeremy did a top job of combining big picture and nitty-gritty talks into the packed schedule.

Breadcrumbs, buttons and buy-in: Patterns Day 3 | hidde.blog

A nice write-up of Patterns Day from Hidde.

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.

Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease - Snook.ca

I hereby dub this Snook’s Law:

Any working system can become invisible to the point where the system loses value because it’s working.

Responsive typography and its role in design systems | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

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?

How NASA Learned to Love the Worm Logo - The New York Times

A delightful ode to a once-divisive design.

How Certain Algorithms to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed – The Markup

A terrific piece from Aaron Sankin that goes from Waldsterben to software development via firefighting and the RAND corporation.

Bureaucracies use measurements to optimize and rearrange the world around them. For those measurements to be effective, they have to be conducted in units as relevant as possible to the conditions on the ground.

Design Systems Database: Surf among top‑notch Design Systems

A collection of collections, this is a directory of design systems, with the handy option to browse by component type. The blueprints section is still a bit thin on the ground, but likes the most useful bit—an in-depth dissection of individual compenent types.

Ship Faster by Building Design Systems Slower | Big Medium

Josh mashes up design systems and pace layers, like Mark did a few years back. With this mindset, if your product interface are in sync, that’s not good—either your product is moving too slow or your design system is moving too fast.

The job of the design system team is not to innovate, but to curate. The system should provide answers only for settled solutions: the components and patterns that don’t require innovation because they’ve been solved and now standardized. Answers go into the design system when the questions are no longer interesting—proven out in product. The most exciting design systems are boring.

What the f••k is a Design System?

Answers on a postcard, please (and by postcard, I mean textarea).

Link colors and the rule of tincture

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.

htmx ~ Why htmx Does Not Have a Build Step

The best reason to write a library in plain JavaScript is that it lasts forever. This is arguably JavaScript’s single most underrated feature. While I’m sure there are some corner cases, JavaScript from 1999 that ran in Netscape Navigator will run unaltered, alongside modern code, in Google Chrome downloaded yesterday. That is true for very few programming environments.

And yet:

Of course, most people’s experience with JavaScript is that it ages like milk. Reopen a node repository after 3 months and you’ll find that your project is mired in a flurry of security warnings, backwards-incompatible library “upgrades,” and a frontend framework whose cultural peak was the exact moment you started the project and is now widely considered tech debt.