đź“ť Articles
The Future of Design Systems is Semantic
Carly explores the revolutionary role of variables in Figma's design systems, emphasising their versatility in storing reusable values for various design and prototyping tasks. Variables extend the capabilities of design tokens, offering more flexibility and complexity, and serve as a bridge between design and development, heralding a new era of dynamic and collaborative design processes.
Design System Documentation: A Key Pillar for Consistent and Collaborative UI Development
Erica Scolaro underscores the value of meticulous design system documentation, notably through tools like Notion, for ensuring consistency, collaboration, and efficient interface creation. The article covers various aspects including component properties, atomic design methodology, behavior, states, variations, and best practices, emphasizing the role of detailed documentation in achieving outstanding user experiences.
Stakeholder management for design systems
Lukas underscores that the success of a design system hinges on effective stakeholder management rather than just the quality of its components. They provides a comprehensive guide on identifying, understanding, and communicating with stakeholders, highlighting their diverse needs and fears, and offering strategies to align the design system's goals with theirs to ensure its adoption and success.
Design system adoption: How to make the team use the design system
Edward focuses on the importance of not just creating a design system, but also ensuring its adoption within a team. They recommend a comprehensive approach that includes marketing the system, providing clear documentation, and offering ongoing support to facilitate its use. (đź’°potential paywall)
đź‘€ Interesting Reads
Implementing Color Design Tokens: Practical Guide
Slava provides a practical guide on implementing colour design tokens as part of a Design System, using their experience at Captiv8 as a case study. They outline the steps for creating and naming colour tokens, and discusses the challenges and benefits of the process, including improved accessibility and streamlined communication within cross-functional teams.
What We’ve Learned About Design Systems Through Supernova’s Mapping Test
The folks at Supernova present insights from their recent Mapping Test on design systems, revealing preferences for consistency, component-heavy deliverables, and centralised governance. The data also highlights differences in perceptions between developers and designers, the influence of company size on design system structure, and the evolving flexibility in design system rules.
From silos to design systems
Debbie delves into the evolution of the Experience Design (XD) function at Sage, a company providing finance, HR, and payroll software. From its siloed beginnings in 2011 with no unified design approach, Sage's XD has transformed into a cohesive, global team in 2023, supported by a robust design system that ensures consistency, usability, and accessibility across products, with a future vision of adapting to emerging technologies and user interfaces.
Why design systems fail
Karen discusses the reasons behind the failure of design systems, citing patterns such as a lack of shared purpose, premature scaling, decision-making difficulties, insufficient ownership and resources, and cultural misalignment. They emphasise the importance of clarifying purpose, starting small, making decisive choices, and aligning the design system with the organisation's culture and needs.