Ahoy hoy!
I cannot believe it's been five months. I've been busy, a little burnt out and the world is in peril. I have an absolute shed load of articles to read, videos to watch, podcasts to listen to, and new design systems to pour over to find you the best reads to fill your inbox.
I'm still trying to carve out time to consume all the above – your dollar bills to my patreon
There may come a time when I hit the send button a couple of times a week. Hold onto your hats.
📝 Articles
📝 Design Tokens beyond colors, typography, and spacing.
I was nodding along with this article from Christiano where they discuss how Design Tokens can be much more than abstract colours, sizing, and typography and include meta information and can create 'component-specific' design tokens.
I've been working with this idea and talking about what more we can get from design tokens recently too. Great to see similarities here.
📝 How to Define Design Principles in Just One (or Two!) Sessions (medium.com)
I love the simple tasks set out in this article to help you create your design principles.
📝 Beyond Purple
A neat introduction into twitch's new Design System, I liked the idea that they've created a 'creator color token' so that users can have their own brands filter into the overall page where the Design Systems team have defined it.
📝 What I learned from 6 months leading a design system for a leading e-commerce company
A great insight to what Budi learned in leading the design system at Bazaar. From where they started to what they did to improve things.
📝 Content: the design system element you forgot
Content, could be seen to be something often omitted from Design Systems. This is a great post on the what and the how to incorporate content into the design system.
👀 Interesting Reads
👀 Hostile CSS: Fortifying System Styles Against Inherited Properties
I really love this idea. Part of my current work is building a system that can work with older versions. Those older versions have terrible CSS choices so we need to tie up all the loose ends on inherency. This kinda thing really helps. ❤️
🔗 Links
🖤 Ruter Components
I really like how they have a live colour contrast checker so you can see how their palette colours can or cannot work together.
🎧 🎥 📊 Audio / Video / Slides
👩🏽🏫 Conferences / Meet-ups / Workshops
🎤 Design Systems AMA Events
Jina is holding some Ask Me Anything sessions with other Design System Advocates on EventBrite, at $5 a time, these will be an absolute steal.