Read the latest articles on how to design, advocate for, and implement a design system in your organization.
November 17, 2020 — Picture this: You’ve landed yourself a killer new role at a company that’s ready to start a design system from scratch and handed you the keys to get this started. What do you do first? Who do you talk to? Do you focus on shipping something sooner or planning a roadmap for the future?
Read this storyOctober 14, 2020 — As systems of visual style spread across a widening landscape of components, platforms and outputs, design tokens — and their names — are increasingly important. Effective token names improve and sustain a team’s shared understanding of visual style through design, code, and other interdisciplinary handoffs.
Read this storyOctober 1, 2020 — The work of my teammates on the IBM.com Library is by no means finished — in fact, they’re just getting started. Here are my 10 hot takes on what can make or break a design system and the team behind it.
Read this storyAugust 25, 2020 — Design systems are a lot like community gardens. Everything in a system has a natural life cycle that begins with a human need, eventually grows into a fully-formed component or pattern, and (if nurtured) evolves over time. We sometimes spend so much time focused on the early parts of this lifecycle that we forget to account for how content grows and evolves within our system.
Read this storyAugust 10, 2020 — In this blog post, I want to discuss some best practices that we followed to create the multiple Lyft Product Language attributes and component libraries. And at the end, I cover some helpful tips and tricks that allow us to efficiently maintain them today.
Read this storyJune 30, 2020 — Design systems haven’t brought about the kind of rich, cross-functional collaboration to most organizations. Instead, the existing divisions between design and implementation have become entrenched, and massively so.
Read this storyJune 26, 2020 — One of the most challenging aspects of managing a design system regardless of maturity is not crafting pixel-perfect components. And it’s certainly not selecting design tokens. It’s perpetuating sustained adoption & buy-in over time.
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