📝 Articles
How to consolidate multiple design systems
Evgeny explains that consolidating multiple design systems involves evaluating different approaches, such as maintaining separate systems, sharing subsystems, creating a new system, or retiring all but one. Each strategy has distinct benefits and challenges, requiring thorough analysis and planning to ensure alignment with organisational goals and efficient use of resources.
Maintaining a design system in Figma
Lukas emphasises the importance of maintaining a design system in Figma by using a branching and pull request process to prevent disruptive updates. This approach helps encapsulate changes, reduce noise, and ensure thorough reviews, ultimately fostering a more stable and efficient design system.
👀 Interesting Reads
Avoid these Design System Traps!
Jason warns against common pitfalls in developing design systems, emphasising the importance of a consistent methodology and alignment with business goals. He advises that poor initial decisions can lead to significant legacy issues, complicating future development and maintenance.
Don’t put crap in the design system
Brad emphasises that rushed, low-quality work has no place in a design system, as it undermines the system's reliability and integrity. He suggests managing this by slowing down, establishing a layered UI ecosystem, maintaining separate paces for design systems and products, creating a "recipes" layer for product-specific patterns, formalising governance, and using branching workflows to keep experimental work contained.
Composability in design systems
Jeremy Keith advocates for composability in design systems, emphasising the importance of providing simple building blocks that designers can mix and match to foster creativity and adoption. He warns against imposing pre-made solutions, as this can stifle creativity and lead to resistance from designers who prefer flexibility and agency in their work.
🧰 Tools / Resources
LeanDS Framework
Marianne's Lean DS Framework canvas is designed to help plan and structure a design system to effectively address business needs. Adapted from Jeff Gothelf’s LeanUX canvas, it focuses on outcomes over deliverables and is divided into 11 sections across three key areas: understanding the purpose (The Why), understanding the drivers and motives (The What), and understanding feasibility (The How). Users are advised to complete the canvas section by section, saving the Hypothesis section for last to ensure a comprehensive overview of the design system and team considerations.
⚡️ Tailwind 2024 Primitives V1.2
Sam’s Figma file provides Tailwind CSS primitives for colours, dimensions, and typography as variables for building themes and integrating into design systems. Utilising Tokens Studio, it allows users to import JSON files, with token names closely matching Tailwind CSS classes, facilitating better collaboration with engineers.
🎧 🎥 📊 Audio / Video / Slides
State of Design Tokens 2024
The "State of Design Tokens 2024" panel discussed key trends and challenges in the design token ecosystem, emphasising the rising adoption of Figma variables and the crucial need for engineering involvement. The discussion highlighted the complexity of naming conventions, the potential shift from traditional z-index usage, and the growing importance of code-based sources of truth for better designer-developer collaboration.