📝 Articles
A Global Design System
Brad advocates for the creation of a Global Design System, proposing a centralized library of common UI components accessible to web designers and developers worldwide. This initiative aims to improve the quality and accessibility of web experiences, save time for designers and developers, and maximise the collective potential by promoting consistency and cohesion in UI design and development practices.
Are Design Systems a zero-interest rate phenomenon?
Dave explores the notion of design systems as a zero-interest rate phenomenon, suggesting they're more of an event-triggered phenomenon. They discuss the value of design systems in maintaining consistency across projects and highlights how they become crucial in response to significant organisational events or challenges.
Design System documentation sucks — how we can do better
Ness highlights the shortcomings of current design system documentation and suggests improvements, including the creation of templates and patterns, semantic token naming, smarter naming and descriptions, refining component fidelity and structure, implementing system onboarding processes, and providing continued education through various channels like Slack announcements and workshops.
Names are complex: Displaying initials for an avatar component in a design system
Georgie explores the intricacies of displaying initials for avatar components in a design system, highlighting the challenges and considerations in determining fallback initials, including parsing names, handling punctuation, and accommodating various naming conventions and formats, ultimately proposing a solution that allows for up to three initials while addressing issues such as limited space and diverse name structures.
👀 Interesting Reads
Building an iconography library using content design
Symoné discusses the comprehensive redesign of Nordstrom's iconography library to ensure consistent naming conventions across teams, addressing challenges of different platforms and requirements. Through collaboration and usability testing, they refined taxonomy guidelines, categorised icons effectively, and created documentation for the shared library, highlighting the importance of compromise and cross-team collaboration in achieving a successful outcome.
Design Systems Burnout
Robin reflects on the phenomenon of burnout in Design Systems work, highlighting the challenges of justifying its significance and the disconnect between practitioners and management. It emphasizes the importance of self-care while underscoring the value of design systems in maintaining interface quality and fostering empathy.
🧰 Tools / Resources
Tokenbase
This looks pretty exciting. Tokenbase - a free, open-source tool for creating, managing and distributing Design Tokens. Looking forward o seeing how its develops.
🖤 Design Systems
Northlight UI
Northlight is the opensource Design System for Mediatool that includes the usual fare of components, icons, guidelines and tokens. I really like how they've leveraged a tool call json crack and embedded a visual representation of where and how the design tokens are used.