Communication failures are human problems, so they’re messy and hard to solve. Design systems are one kind of tool that people look to in order to solve problems that are fundamentally about failures in collaboration and alignment. In this article, Amy Thibodeau will include practical advice that will be useful to anyone who is thinking about creating a design system to enable harmonious, integrated, and fundamentally successful product development.
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13 live webinars. Four days. That’s the Design Systems Virtual Summit which our friends at UXPin are hosting from February 13th to 16th. Join free from anywhere, and learn from experienced practitioners how to build and maintain a design system efficiently. The four days will be jam-packed with first-hand insights provided by experts from companies like Atlassian, Airbnb, Linkedin, IBM, and more. To make learning as practical as possible, each speaker will share lessons learned from real projects and case studies — takeaways that you can apply to your work right away.
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What are the key qualities of a well-functioning, enduring design system? Throughout the book, Alla will share an approach that will help you every day with your work.
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We’ve been closely working with Maya on this article, and we’re happy to see the final result now being published on 18F. We highly encourage more teams to share the lessons they learned when building design systems or pattern libraries, and we’re always happy to support them in writing, editing and shaping that article. This post is a re-post of Maya’s final article. In this article, Maya will shed some light on how to built tools to leverage industry-standard best practices and produce a design system with reusable components.
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In this chapter, Brad Frost will tackle all that goes into selling, creating, and maintaining effective design systems. What begins as a giant slab of rock can turn into a finely polished sculpture, thanks to a ton of hard work, genuine collaboration, constant communication, and plenty of iteration. If you like what you read, we’ve got you covered! The print version of Smashing Book 5 (including the eBook) bundled with the Atomic Design eBook is available today for just $29 — down from $49. Get the bundle now. You ready? Let’s go.
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When building a pattern library, we tend to focus too much on the modules, providing a structural view of the system, rather than showing how it can be used effectively — thereby undermining its usefulness to most team members. Finding the right way to architect a lasting pattern library is difficult. This article highlights some practical techniques and strategies to establish a pattern library that will be actively and consistently used by the entire team.
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The benefits of UI design systems are now well known. They lead to more cohesive, consistent user experiences. They speed up your team’s workflow, allowing you to launch more stuff while saving huge amounts of time and money in the process. They establish a common vocabulary between disciplines, resulting in a more collaborative and constructive workflow.
They make browser, device, performance, and accessibility testing easier. And they serve as a solid foundation to build upon over time, helping your organization to more easily adapt to the ever-shifting web landscape. This article provides a detailed guide to building and maintaining atomic design systems with Pattern Lab 2.
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Creating a flexible UI system that is consistent and easy to customize, while also scalable and cost-efficient, depends not only on how it is built, but on how it is designed. A library of components has very little value if every new design is created independently, ignoring established standards and patterns. In this article, Adriana De La Cuadra explains the value of modularity in UI design and how it ties into the process of style guide-driven development, which improves the implementation of flexible and user-friendly applications, while helping designers and developers collaborate more productively.
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Creating a living style guide is a long but worthwhile process. Steven Lambert made a few mistakes along the way that prevented developers and designers from adopting it sooner or using it effectively. However, he pushed through and eventually made it to the end. This is the story of how Steven developed a living style guide, the mistakes made along the way, and why the current landscape of style guide generators did not suit his needs.
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In his article on Selling Design Systems, Dan Mall suggests to illustrate how fractured an organization is by printing out its different presences online and putting them on a large board as an example of all the wasted money and effort that goes into making sites from scratch, one-by-one, needlessly reinventing the wheel every time. What Vitaly Friedman learned from his experience is that trying to focus on the workflow or the process is never as helpful as focusing on tangible benefits that the client will get as a result.
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