What walls are for – disambiguity

Five Key Milestones in the Life of a Design System - daverupert.com

Five moments in the lifecycle of a design system. They grow up so fast!

1. Formation of the Design System Team
2. First Page Shipped
3. Consumable Outside the Main Product
4. First Non-System Team Consumer
5. First Breaking Change

Dave makes the observation that design systems are less like open source software and more like enterprise software—software you didn’t choose to use:

Often, in my experience, for an internal Design System to have widespread adoption it requires a literal executive mandate from the top floor of the building.

Also: apparently design systems have achieved personhood now and we’re capitalising them as proper names. First name Design, last name System.

“Please, call me Design. Mr. System was my father.”

Jon Aizlewood · Agile and design — How to avoid Frankensteining your product

Jon’s ranting about Agile here, but it could equally apply to design systems:

Agile and design is like looking at a picture through a keyhole. By slicing big things into smaller things, designers must work incrementally. Its this incrementalism that can lead to what I call the ‘Frankensteining’ of a digital product or service.

When your design system fails — HeyDesigner

You could create components that strike the perfect balance between reuse and context sensitivity. But defining the components of your design system is just the first step. It has to make its way into the product. If it doesn’t, a design system is like a language with no extant literature or seminal texts.

Marissa Christy outlines the reasons why your design system might struggle:

1. The redesign isn’t prioritized
2. The tech stack is changing
3. Maintenance takes discipline

But she also offers advice for counteracting these forces:

1. Get buy-in from the whole team
2. Prioritize a lightweight re-skin on older parts of the product
3. Treat a design system like any other product project: start small
4. Don’t wait for others. Lead by example.
5. Finally, don’t compare yourself to others on the internet

“Designer + Developer Workflow,” an article by Dan Mall

Dan compares the relationship between a designer and developer in the web world to the relationship between an art director and a copywriter in the ad world. He and Brad made a video to demonstrate how they collaborate.

Relative Requirements – CSS Wizardry

I really like this exercise by Harry. I’ve done similar kinds of grading using dot-voting in the past. It feels like an early step to establishing design principles: “this over that.”

By deciding what we value up-front, we have an agreement that we can look back on in order to help us settle these conflicts and get us back on track again.

Relative Requirements remove the personal aspect of these disagreements and instead focuses on more objective agreements that we made as a team.