📝 Articles
Handling breaking changes in a design system without causing chaos
Shaun explores how to introduce breaking changes in design systems without disrupting product teams, drawing on lessons from leading Spotify's system. Key strategies include defining what constitutes a breaking change, using semantic versioning pragmatically with usage data, communicating early and repeatedly, and investing in migration tools to make upgrades seamless.
The Cost of Consistency: Avoiding Design System Bottlenecks
Omid examines the hidden costs of design systems, exploring how they can become bottlenecks as they mature. Drawing from experience building an Angular-based system, hey discuss the rigidity trap and abstraction tax, advocating for a federated governance model that balances consistency with autonomy and knowing when not to use the system at all.
Beyond Components: Building a Design Language System at Scale
Oleg presents a comprehensive framework for evolving component libraries into Design Language Systems, where DOM plus tokens form the contract and frameworks become thin adapters. By implementing design tokens as API, semantic HTML/CSS as grammar, and governance through CI rather than documentation, teams can achieve deterministic parity across stacks whilst making rebrands, framework upgrades, and quality assurance predictable rather than heroic.
The design system paradox: How abstraction can hollow out quality
PJ argues that design systems, whilst managing complexity through abstraction, risk creating dangerous dependency as foundational design and development skills erode across teams. He advocates for design systems to prioritise education, maintain strict focus, and build closer to bare-metal solutions to sustain long-term software quality rather than accelerate its decline.
👀 Interesting Reads
Figma Slots for Repeating Items
Nathan explores how Figma's native slots solve the challenge of composing repeating items like checkboxes in groups or tabs in navigation. He explains how this feature replaces problematic workarounds such as instance swapping and hidden layers, offering practical guidance on naming conventions, default content, and architectural considerations for Design System teams migrating their libraries.
To Be a Leader of Systems
Hazel explores the paradoxes of leading complex systems, using the metaphor of being stranded in an infinite ocean. They argues that effective systems leadership requires holding contradictory truths simultaneously: accepting probable failure whilst maintaining unshakable conviction, and preparing others for setbacks even as you lead them forward with certainty.
🛠 Tutorials
🧰 Tools / Resources
Design Systems Checklist
Tyler has created a comprehensive checklist covering design language, foundations, core components, and maintenance to help teams build more complete and scalable Design Systems. This living document offers practical guidance across areas like accessibility, typography, component states, and community processes, making it a useful reference for teams at any stage of their system's development.