Building a Design System at a Startup
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Building a Design System at a Startup
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Re: Building a Design System at a Startup
#2Don't. There are many existing systems to choose from. Very unlikely another design system the user has never encountered before will add value.
Re: Building a Design System at a Startup
#3Don't. There are many existing systems to choose from. Very unlikely another design system the user has never encountered before will add value.
Feels a little to strong for something that provides deep value for a company and must be unique to your brand in order to truly differentiate yourself.
Re: Building a Design System at a Startup
#4Don't. There are many existing systems to choose from. Very unlikely another design system the user has never encountered before will add value.
Most design systems solve things specific to that particular company. And the vast majority of available design systems (that is whose documentation or even components are opensourced or publicly available) are any combination of the following:
- abject shit. A material-ui or bootstrap wannabe with poorly thought-out colors, spacing, and interactions. And often has the same problems with sizes, affordances, contrast etc.
- underpowered. Contains too few components beyond the simplest of the simplest buttons and a tab control.
- underspecified (about 99.99999% of all design systems). Does not have any documentation on how elements interact, how they look and work together in complex layouts.
Re: Building a Design System at a Startup
#5Don't. There are many existing systems to choose from. Very unlikely another design system the user has never encountered before will add value.
That's not entirely true. Even if you use something as full-featured as Material UI, there's still opinions on how elements are composed, when to use font colors and sizes, etc. Without documenting what to do in common cases, every page will end up looking slightly different.
I'm the only dev on my team but I already started a styleguide to help me see how CSS changes affect all components, and as a way to copy/paste common patterns.
Re: Building a Design System at a Startup
#6Line heights are still a pain for consistent spacing in the browser. I'm really hoping for more progress on CSS Inline Layout Module Level 3 and the `leading-trim` property.
https://css-tricks.com/leading-trim-the-future-of-digital-ty...
Re: Building a Design System at a Startup
#7Don't. There are many existing systems to choose from. Very unlikely another design system the user has never encountered before will add value.
At a $LARGE_CO and we didn't start from scratch. We're building on top of an existing OSS design system. It didn't take much work to feel different enough as to avoid kneejerk "this is clearly a {bootstrap, material design, etc} website". Overriding the font and color palette goes a long way, though we certainly did more customization.
The challenging part is to get all UI teams to agree to one UI framework. To date, there aren't many a11y compliant web component implementations to build off of. And we have teams with strong preferences for Angular, Vue, and React. With bespoke components for each UI framework, the app feels glued together. Trying to get my director to put their foot down and force us all to align on one.
Re: Building a Design System at a Startup
#8Don't. There are many existing systems to choose from. Very unlikely another design system the user has never encountered before will add value.
Most design systems solve things specific to that particular company. And the vast majority of available design systems (that is whose documentation or even components are opensourced or publicly available) are any combination of the following: - abject shit. A material-ui or bootstrap wannabe with poorly thought-out colors, spacing, and interactions. And often has the same problems with sizes, affordances, contrast…
A design system will likely never solve the 'underspecified' problem. You need a visual design team that is holistically aware of all screens in the application, so they can make reasonable suggestions to engineers about how to group components in complex layouts.
Re: Building a Design System at a Startup
#9Don't. There are many existing systems to choose from. Very unlikely another design system the user has never encountered before will add value.
At a $LARGE_CO and we didn't start from scratch. We're building on top of an existing OSS design system. It didn't take much work to feel different enough as to avoid kneejerk "this is clearly a {bootstrap, material design, etc} website". Overriding the font and color palette goes a long way, though we certainly did more customization. The challenging part is to get all UI teams to agree to one UI framework. To date,…
Which design system did you use as a starting point?
Re: Building a Design System at a Startup
#10As someone who has done this at work, build it in such a way that your documentation is also your sandbox. That way whenever you go to design something new, you do it in your sandbox, and then the documentation is already done.