Howdy!
It's been a busy few weeks and I hope you've all been happily building out yours or your clients Design Systems. I've spent the last couple of weeks testing out our utility classes that are built from our design tokens to see how far we can create new components from them as well as adding more utility classes for layout and text and taking another look at the corresponding documentation and making improvements.
I'm off to Brighton at the end of this week to attend FFConf. I'm really looking forward to learning lots and lots of things and catching up with friends. Ooh, I love a good conference.
Hope you enjoy the latest set of links.
📝 Articles
📝 Building the Constellation Design System
This a great post from Geri. I really liked how they went about setting the system up and loved the inclusion of what didn't quite go according to plan, and how they adapted as they moved forward.
📝 Design System Communications
This is almost perfect timing with my current client work as we're just dusting off the cobwebs from the Slack channels. I really like how Nathan goes into the what, how, where and who in this post. Some great takeaways.
📝 Cross-Platform Design Tokens With Amazon Style Dictionary
I've only briefly looked at Style Dictionary as my client work is working a-ok using Theo. But I really like how Marius writes about their starting out using it to unify the design across multiple platforms here.I'm hoping we get an update from their next steps.
📝 A Design System Governance Process
I really liked Yaili's article on the roadmap for Vanilla, Ubuntu's design system. In this article (with video) Brad shares a much larger flow diagram(?) on what to do when a component doesn't exist, a component is almost there but needs a "tweak" or if a user of the design system has a question. With a video explaining the diagram, plus a detailed rundown of each step and potential outcome. This is a great read.
🔗 Links
📖 Laying the Foundations — A Book About Design Systems
I was fortunate to get a pre-release copy of this and it's a fantastic resource! From selling a design system to getting started, to iterating, documenting, and maintaining. There's a lot of great takeaways.
🖤 Duet Design System
There are so many great details and decisions made in this Design System. I really like the colour design tokens with the description of usage and the colour contrast inline with the colours. The guidelines are really thorough. And the guide on using the components in your JS framework of choice (or not) is really good. Top stuff!
🖤 Spectrum, Adobe’s design system
There is so many lovely parts to this Design System from Adobe. I really like the amount of detail that each part of the Foundation section gets into.
🖤 Chicago Design System
Built upon the fantastic USWDS I really like the thorough documentation pages they have for accessibility. The list of resources, checklists. and specific component requirements is fantastic.
🖤 Terra UI
I love the "upgrade guides" that are included in components (that need them) in the component library of Cerner's Design System here. Th issue form 'pop-up' is a pretty neat idea too.
Thanks
I hope you've enjoyed this issues set of links, and the slightly modified format.
If you've really enjoyed the links, and the newsletter dropping into your inbox at anytime it feels like it then you could always sponsor my Patreon page to help me find the time to continue reading, watching and listening to everything I can on Design Systems, so you don't have to.