CategoryDesign Systems

February 21, 2019 — It’s important to understand how animation can be used (or not used) in your design system. In this article, Val Head explains how you can help ensure that your brand is using animation consistently and effectively while also helping your team work faster. Read more…

November 29, 2018 — Using a Structured Content Management System (SCMS) can be a great way to free your content from a paradigm that begins to feel its age. In this article, Knut Melvær suggests some overarching strategies, with some concrete real-world examples on how to think about working with structured content. Read more…

March 2, 2018 — This article includes 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. Read more…

January 16, 2018 — 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. Read more…

October 10, 2017 — 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. Read more…

October 9, 2017 — Editor’s Note: 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. Today, there are nearly 30,000 U.S. federal websites with almost no consistency between them. Between the hundreds of thousands of government employees working in technology, there’s nothing in common with how these websites are built or maintained. Read more…

December 6, 2016 —

Editor’s Note: _We are all trying to figure it out: how do we design flexible and future-proof responsive websites without reinventing the wheel every time a new requirement comes in? You’ve heard of atomic design, but how do we actually make it applicable in every day situations? Let’s figure it out! We’ve teamed up with Brad Frost to set up an eBook bundle with the brand-new Atomic Design and our lovely Smashing Book #5 — available in ePUB, Kindle and PDF. Good things come in pairs! Get the bundle, and save 50% off the regular price._

Talk is cheap. And up until now, we’ve been doing a whole lotta talkin’. That’s not to say it hasn’t been productive talk! After all, we’ve discussed the importance of modular thinking, we’ve learned a methodology for crafting deliberate UI design systems, and we’ve showcased tools for creating effective pattern libraries. But here’s where the rubber meets the road. Where we roll up our sleeves and put all of this theory into practice. Where we get stuff done. This chapter will tackle all that goes into selling, creating, and maintaining effective design systems. You ready? Let’s go.

October 13, 2016 — 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. Read more…

July 13, 2016 — 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. Read more…

June 15, 2016 — Using a style guide to drive development is a practice that is gaining a lot of traction in front-end development — and for good reason. Developers will start in the style guide by adding new code or updating existing code, thereby contributing to a modular UI system that is later integrated in the application. But in order to implement a modular UI system, we must approach design in a modular way. Modular design encourages us to think and design a UI and UX in patterns. For example, instead of designing a series of pages or views to enable a user to accomplish a task, we would start the design process by understanding how the UI system is structured and how its components can be used to create the user flow. Read more…