Everyone needs a design system. You can pick one off the shelf or put one together pretty quickly, and your problems are over. As with many things on the web, your mileage may vary. Like many things, a design system isn’t ever a finished thing — it’s a journey. How we go about that journey can affect the things we produce along the way. Before diving in and starting to plan anything out, be clear about where the benefits and the risks might lie.
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Maintaining a design system is a lot of work. In this article, we will have a look at what solutions fit inside the umbrella of a Design System, and a few important steps and checkpoints you need to keep an eye on throughout your projects. Here, Atila Fassina shares his lessons learned and how a platform such as Backlight can help put together a series of tools to speed up your architecture setup.
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Joining a team where there are no established design practices may feel disheartening. Does this situation resonate with you? If yes, then read on — as this article is sharing the author’s advice based on his personal experience and it will show you a way (although not easy) of facing the problem in a manner that will bring other benefits, beside order and consistency.
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Did you know that your chosen color palette can have an impact on how much energy your website uses? Even a more environmentally friendly choice of colors can reduce the impact on the battery life of mobile devices. In this article, Michelle Barker shares advice on the not-so-obvious things you have to keep in mind when handling colors in CSS today.
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Design systems can improve usability, but they can also limit creativity or fall out of sync with actual products. In this article, we’ll explore how designers and developers can create more robust design systems by building a culture of collaboration.
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Design is increasingly becoming more complex. Design processes require having a tight cross-functional collaboration between all teams involved in the creation of the product. Having a shared design language empowers teams to collaborate more effectively. That’s why many companies invest in design systems. But how can we ensure that a design system actually works for a product you’re working on and improves your team’s productivity? In this article, Nick Babich will try to find the qualities that make a design system good for your product development.
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Switching tools isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. In this article, Buzz Usborne brings you a nuts-and-bolts and behind-the-scenes look at how Help Scout migrated design systems from Sketch to Figma — why we made the switch, a step-by-step walkthrough of what it entailed, and what we got out of it — a story that applies to any team considering a large-scale tool migration.
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When customers interact with your brand, they’re not aware of what’s going on backstage, and there is no reason they should. All they perceive is the play you’re presenting, the story you’re sharing, and the solution it represents for them. There is only one brand experience. At the end of the day, customers are not tasting individual ingredientz, they’re eating the entire meal. At once. In sit-downs that keep getting shorter. When the individual actors go off script, as great as they might sound solo, the brand experience breaks.
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Styling applications is a world in itself, one not often given the importance and attention it deserves. With complex modern user interfaces, it’s only matter of time before your app becomes a mess of unordered styles, reducing consistency and making it harder for new code to be added or changes made to the existing codebase. In this article, Ajay NS welcomes you to take a detailed dive into the different ways of organizing styling in modern applications which often have complex interfaces and design patterns. Let’s walk through BEM, preprocessors, CSS-in-JS and even design systems to find out what works best for you.
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The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. Today, Vitaly Friedman talks to Brad Frost, author of the book Atomic Design that introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems.
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