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Making Room for Variation
30.12.2019
Say you have a design system and you're having a moment where it doesn't have what you need. You need to diverge and create something new. Yesenia Perez-Cruz categorizes these moments from essentially ooops to niiice:
There are three kinds of deviations that come up in...
Two Lessons I Learned From Making React Components
19.12.2019
Here’s a couple of lessons I’ve learned about how not to build React components. These are things I've come across over the past couple of months and thought they might be of interest to you if you’re working on a design system, especially one with a bunch of legacy technical decisions and a lot...
Design APIs: The Evolution of Design Systems
17.12.2019
A clever idea from Matthew Ström:
[...] design APIs don’t seem like a stretch of the imagination. An API-driven approach is the natural extension of the work currently being done on design systems, including tokens and standardization projects.
If you buy into the idea of design tokens, that...
Collective #568
25.11.2019
Global Design Survey 2019 * HexaBeat * Creepyface * Design APIs: The Evolution of Design Systems * Print To CSS
Collective #568 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
Smarter Design Systems Tools
22.11.2019
What has me really excited about building websites is largely around design systems and the design tools we use to build them. Though, design systems are certainly not limited to websites.
Closing the Gap
In the ever-so-hot-right-now world of design systems, one of the most common phrases people...
Designing accessible color systems
21.10.2019
The team at Stripe explores how they’re refining their color palette to make it more accessible and legible for users across all their products and interfaces. Not only that but the team built a wonderful and yet entirely bonkers app for figuring out the ideal range of colors that they needed.
We...
Laying the Foundations
18.10.2019
Here’s a new book by Andrew Couldwell all about design systems and his team’s experience at Sprout Social. For a while now they’ve been building Seeds, a brand guide that the internal team can and reference for brand and design-related things, including patterns, variables, and components....
A Codebase and a Community
27.9.2019
I woke up one morning and realized that I had it all wrong. I discovered that code and design are unable to solve every problem on a design systems team, even if many problems can be solved by coding and designing in a dark room all day. Wait, huh? How on earth does that make any sense? Well...
Getting design system customization just right
29.7.2019
I had a little rant in me a few months ago about design systems: "Who Are Design Systems For?" My main point was that there are so many public and open source ones out there that choosing one can feel like choosing new furniture for your house. You just measure up what you need and what you like...
The Guardian digital design system
29.7.2019
Here’s a fascinating look at The Guardian’s design system with a step-by-step breakdown of what's gone into it and what options are available to designers and developers. It shows us how the team treats colors, typography, layouts, and visual cues like rules and borders.
I’ve been struggling...
Collective #526
20.6.2019
How to Section Your HTML * Darkmode.js * Drop caps & design systems * Servo
Collective #526 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
Drop caps & design systems
19.6.2019
Ethan Marcotte has written up his process for how to make drop caps accessible for screen readers and browsers alike. All of that is very interesting and I’m sure I’ll use a technique like this in the near future, but the part that made me hop out of my seat is where Ethan notes his experience with...
Snag Resources from An Event Apart Boston 2019 and Save on Washington D.C. Registration
6.6.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Hey, so we talked a little bit about An Event Apart Boston 2019 leading up to the event and now there are a ton of resources available from it. I stopped counting the number of links after 50 because there's way more than that. Seriously, there's stuff in there...
Material Theming: Making Material Your Own!
3.6.2019
The web is a beautiful, expressive medium that’s evolved over time as trends and technology have changed. Moments of delight and flair are what set companies apart from one another. At the same time, today’s top products rely on scalable, component-based design systems to efficiently develop...
A Practical Use Case for Vue Render Functions: Building a Design System Typography Grid
30.5.2019
This post covers how I built a typography grid for a design system using Vue render functions. Here’s the demo and the code. I used render functions because they allow you to create HTML with a greater level of control than regular Vue templates, yet surprisingly I couldn’t find very much when...
Who Are Design Systems For?
23.4.2019
Specific design systems, I mean. Design systems, as a concept, are something just about any site can benefit from.
A lot of hype goes into design systems these days. Just the other day, an organization's published their design system publicly and I got a slew of DMs, emails, and Slack messages...
Revisiting the Rendering Tier
5.4.2019
Have you ever created a well-intentioned, thoughtful design system only to watch it grow into an ever-increasing and scary codebase? I've been working in sort of the opposite direction, inheriting the scary codebase and trying to create a thoughtful system from it.
Here's Alex Sanders on the topic...
Powers of Two
28.3.2019
Refactoring is one of those words that evokes fear in the eyes of many folks, from developers to product owners and everyone in between. It may as well be a four-letter word in many ways. It's also something that we talk about quite a bit around here because, like books on the topic, where to start...
Design Systems and Portfolios
15.3.2019
In my experience working with design systems, I’ve found that I have to sacrifice my portfolio to do it well. Unlike a lot of other design work where it’s relatively easy to present Dribbble-worthy interfaces and designs, I fear that systems are quite a bit trickier than that.
You could make things...
Getting to Grips with the Airtable API
14.2.2019
The Airtable web app is pretty neat. You can use it like a spreadsheet but it’s useful for all sorts of other things too. The neatest thing about it for me is that it has an API so that you can treat it like a database.
I’ve been thinking about making weekly notes for the different teams I work...