Tags: guides

55

sparkline

Wednesday, April 26th, 2023

WPDS - Accessibility | Resources

I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.

Monday, July 13th, 2020

A walkthrough of our design system and how we got here | Kyan

It all started at Patterns Day…

(Note: you’ll probably need to use Reader mode to avoid taxing your eyes reading this—the colour contrast …doesn’t.)

Monday, June 1st, 2020

Global and Component Style Settings with CSS Variables — Sara Soueidan

Sara shares how she programmes with custom properties in CSS. It sounds like her sensible approach aligns quite nicely with Andy’s CUBE CSS methodology.

Oh, and she’s using Fractal to organise her components:

I’ve been using Fractal for a couple of years now. I chose it over other pattern library tools because it fit my needs perfectly — I wanted a tool that was unopinionated and flexible enough to allow me to set up and structure my project the way I wanted to. Fractal fit the description perfectly because it is agnostic as to the way I develop or the tools I use.

Wednesday, May 13th, 2020

Modern CSS Solutions

…for old CSS problems.

Very handy!

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019

Patterns Day video and audio

If you missed out on Patterns Day this year, you can still get a pale imitation of the experience of being there by watching videos of the talks.

Here are the videos, and if you’re not that into visuals, here’s a podcast of the talks (you can subscribe to this RSS feed in your podcasting app of choice).

On Twitter, Chris mentioned that “It would be nice if the talks had their topic listed,” which is a fair point. So here goes:

It’s fascinating to see emergent themes (other than, y’know, the obvious theme of design systems) in different talks. In comparison to the first Patterns Day, it felt like there was a healthy degree of questioning and scepticism—there were plenty of reminders that design systems aren’t a silver bullet. And I very much appreciated Yaili’s point that when you see beautifully polished design systems that have been made public, it’s like seeing the edited Instagram version of someone’s life. That reminded me of Responsive Day Out when Sarah Parmenter, the first speaker at the very first event, opened everything by saying “most of us are winging it.”

I can see the value in coming to a conference to hear stories from people who solved hard problems, but I think there’s equal value in coming to a conference to hear stories from people who are still grappling with hard problems. It’s reassuring. I definitely got the vibe from people at Patterns Day that it was a real relief to hear that nobody’s got this figured out.

There was also a great appreciation for the “big picture” perspective on offer at Patterns Day. For myself, I know that I’ll be cogitating upon Danielle’s talk and Emil’s talk for some time to come—both are packed full of ineresting ideas.

Good thing we’ve got the videos and the podcast to revisit whenever we want.

And if you’re itching for another event dedicated to design systems, I highly recommend snagging a ticket for the Clarity conference in San Francisco next month.

Monday, July 1st, 2019

Patterns Day Two

Who says the sequels can’t be even better than the original? The second Patterns Day was The Empire Strikes Back, The Godfather Part II, and The Wrath of Khan all rolled into one …but, y’know, with design systems.

If you were there, then you know how good it was. If you weren’t, sorry. Audio of the talks should be available soon though, with video following on.

The talks were superb! I know I’m biased becuase I put the line-up together, but even so, I was blown away by the quality of the talks. There were some big-picture questioning talks, a sequence of nitty-gritty code talks in the middle, and galaxy-brain philosophical thoughts at the end. A perfect mix, in my opinion.

Words cannot express how grateful I am to Alla, Yaili, Amy, Danielle, Heydon, Varya, Una, and Emil. They really gave it their all! Some of them are seasoned speakers, and some of them are new to speaking on stage, but all of them delivered the goods above and beyond what I expected.

Big thanks to my Clearleft compadres for making everything run smoothly: Jason, Amy, Cassie, Chris, Trys, Hana, and especially Sophia for doing all the hard work behind the scenes. Trys took some remarkable photos too. He posted some on Twitter, and some on his site, but there are more to come.

Me on stage. Inside the Duke of York's for Patterns Day 2

And if you came to Patterns Day 2, thank you very, very much. I really appreciate you being there. I hope you enjoyed it even half as much as I did, because I had a ball!

Once again, thanks to buildit @ wipro digital for sponsoring the pastries and coffee, as well as running a fun giveaway on the day. Many thank to Bulb for sponsoring the forthcoming videos. Thanks again to Drew for recording the audio. And big thanks to Brighton’s own Holler Brewery for very kindly offering every attendee a free drink—the weather (and the beer) was perfect for post-conference discussion!

It was incredibly heartwarming to hear how much people enjoyed the event. I was especially pleased that people were enjoying one another’s company as much as the conference itself. I knew that quite a few people were coming in groups from work, while other people were coming by themselves. I hoped there’d be lots of interaction between attendees, and I’m so, so glad there was!

You’ve all made me very happy.

Sunday, June 30th, 2019

The Patterns Day Edition | Amy Hupe, content designer.

Amy’s talk at Patterns Day was absolutely brilliant! Here’s an account of the day from her perspective.

The evident care Jeremy put into assembling the lineup meant an incredible mix of talks, covering the big picture stuff right down to the nitty gritty, and plenty in between.

Her observation about pre-talk nerves is spot-on:

I say all of this because it’s important for me and I think anyone who suffers with anxiety about public speaking, or in general, to recognise that having a sense of impending doom doesn’t mean that doom is actually impending.

Patterns Day

Here’s a nice little round-up of Friday’s Patterns Day.

Weeknotes #16 | Trys Mudford

Just look at these fantastic pictures that Trys took (very unobstrusively) at Patterns Day—so rock’n’roll!

The audience and the stage.

Closing remarks.

The Clearleft crew.

Patterns Day notes

Stuart took copious notes during every single talk at Patterns Day—what a star!

Monday, June 10th, 2019

The schedule for Patterns Day

Patterns Day is less than three weeks away—exciting!

We’re going to start the day at a nice civilised time. Registration is from 9am. There will be tea, coffee, and pastries, so get there in plenty of time to register and have a nice chat with your fellow attendees. There’ll be breaks throughout the day too.

Those yummy pastries and hot drinks are supplied courtesy of our sponsors Buildit @ Wipro Digital—many thanks to them!

Each talk will be 30 minutes long. There’ll be two talks back-to-back and then a break. That gives you plenty of breathing space to absorb all those knowledge bombs that the speakers will be dropping.

Lunch will be a good hour and a half. Lunch isn’t provided so you can explore the neighbourhood where there are plenty of treats on offer. And your Patterns Day badge will even get you some discounts…

The lovely Café Rust is offering these deals to attendees:

  • Cake and coffee for £5
  • Cake and cup of tea for £4
  • Sandwich and a drink for £7

The Joker (right across the street from the conference venue) is offering a 10% discount of food and drinks (but not cocktails) to Patterns Day attendees. I highly recommend their hot wings. Try the Rufio sauce—it’s awesome! Do not try the Shadow—it will kill you.

Here’s how the day is looking:

Registration
Opening remarks
Alla
Yaili
Break
Amy
Danielle
Lunch
Heydon
Varya
Break
Una
Emil
Closing remarks

We should be out of the Duke of York’s by 4:45pm after a fantastic day of talks. At that point, we can head around the corner (literally) to Holler Brewery. They are very kindly offering each attendee a free drink! Over to them:

Holler is a community based brewery, always at the centre of the local community. Here to make great beer, but also to help support community run pubs, carnival societies, mental health charities, children’s amateur dramatic groups, local arts groups and loads more, because these are what keep our communities healthy and together… the people in them!

Holler loves great beer and its way of bringing people together. They are excited to be welcoming the Patterns Day attendees and the design community to the taproom.

Terms and conditions:

  • One token entitles to you one Holler beer or one soft drink
  • Redeemable only on Friday 28th June 2019 between 4:45 and 20:00
  • You must hand your token over to the bar team

You’ll get your token when you register in the morning, along with your sticker. That’s right; sticker. Every expense has been spared so you won’t even have a name badge on a lanyard, just a nice discrete but recognisable sticker for the event.

I am so, so excited for Patterns Day! See you at the Duke of York’s on June 28th!

Wednesday, May 29th, 2019

Sponsor Patterns Day

Patterns Day 2 is sold out! Yay!

I didn’t even get the chance to announce the full line-up before all the tickets were sold. That was meant to my marketing strategy, see? I’d announce some more speakers every few weeks, and that would encourage more people to buy tickets. Turns out that I didn’t need to do that.

But I’m still going to announce the final two speakers here becuase I’m so excited about them—Danielle Huntrods and Varya Stepanova!

Danielle is absolutely brilliant. I know this from personal experience because I worked alongside her at Clearleft for three years. Now she’s at Bulb and I can’t wait for everyone at Patterns Day to hear her galaxy brain thoughts on design systems.

And how could I not have Varya at Patterns Day? She lives and breathes design systems. Whether it’s coding, writing, speaking, or training, she’s got years of experience to share. Ever used BEM? Yeah, that was Varya.

Anyway, if you’ve got your ticket for Patterns Day, you’re in for a treat.

If you didn’t manage to get a ticket for Patterns Day …sorry.

But do not despair. There is still one possible way of securing an elusive Patterns Day ticket: get your company to sponsor the event.

We’ve already got one sponsor—buildit @ wipro digital—who are kindly covering the costs for teas, coffees, and pastries. Now I’m looking for another sponsor to cover the costs of making video recordings of the talks.

The cost of sponsorship is £2000. In exchange, I can’t offer you a sponsor stand or anything like that—there’s just no room at the venue. But you will earn my undying thanks, and you’ll get your logo on the website and on the screen in between talks on the day (and on the final videos).

I can also give you four tickets to Patterns Day.

This is a sponsorship strategy that I like to call “blackmail.”

If you were really hoping to bring your team to Patterns Day, but you left it too late to get your tickets, now’s your chance. Convince your company to sponsor the event (and let’s face it, £2000 is a rounding error on some company’s books). Then you and your colleagues need not live with eternal regret and FOMO.

Drop me a line. Let’s talk.

Tuesday, April 16th, 2019

Three more Patterns Day speakers

There are 73 days to go until Patterns Day. Do you have your ticket yet?

Perhaps you’ve been holding out for some more information on the line-up. Well, I’m more than happy to share the latest news with you—today there are three new speakers on the bill…

Emil Björklund, the technical director at the Malmö outpost of Swedish agency inUse, is a super-smart person I’ve known for many years. Last year, I saw him on stage in his home town at the Confront conference sharing some of his ideas on design systems. He blew my mind! I told him there and then that he had to come to Brighton and expand on those thoughts some more. This is going to be an unmissable big-picture talk in the style of Paul’s superb talk last year.

Speaking of superb talks from last year, Alla Kholmatova is back! Her closing talk from the first Patterns Day was so fantastic that it I just had to have her come back. Oh, and since then, her brilliant book on Design Systems came out. She’s going to have a lot to share!

The one thing that I felt was missing from the first Patterns Day was a focus on inclusive design. I’m remedying that this time. Heydon Pickering, creator of the Inclusive Components website—and the accompanying book—is speaking at Patterns Day. I’m very excited about this. Given that Heydon has a habit of casually dropping knowledge bombs like the lobotomised owl selector and the flexbox holy albatross, I can’t wait to see what he unleashes on stage in Brighton on June 28th.

Emil Björklund Alla Kholmatova Heydon Pickering
Emil, Alla, and Heydon

Be there or be square.

Tickets for Patterns Day are still available, but you probably don’t want to leave it ‘till the last minute to get yours. Just sayin’.

The current—still incomplete—line-up comprises:

That isn’t even the full roster of speakers, and it’s already an unmissable event!

I very much hope you’ll join me in the beautiful Duke of York’s cinema on June 28th for a great day of design system nerdery.

Thursday, February 28th, 2019

Patterns Day 2: June 28th, 2019

Surprise! Patterns Day is back!

The first Patterns Day was in the Summer of 2017, and it was a glorious—a single day devoted to all things design system-y: pattern libraries, style guides, maintainability, reusability. It was a lot of fun, so let’s do it again!

Patterns Day 2 will take place on Friday, June 28th, in the beautiful Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton. If you went to the first Patterns Day, then you’ll know how luxuriously comfy it is in there.

Tickets are £175+VAT. The format will likely be the same as before: an action-packed day of eight talks, each 30 minutes long.

I’ve got an amazing line-up of speakers, but instead of telling you the whole line-up straightaway, I’m going to tease a little bit, and announce more speakers over the next few weeks and months. For now, here are the first three speakers, to give you an idea of the quality you can expect:

  • All the way from the US of A, it’s Una Kravets, who needs no introduction.
  • From the Government Digital Service, we’ve got Amy Hupe—she’ll have plenty to share about the GOV.UK design system.
  • And we’ve got Yaili, now a senior designer at Microsoft, where she works on the Azure DevOps design system.

Patterns Day will have something for everyone. We’ll be covering design, development, content strategy, product management, and accessibility. So you might want to make this a one-day outing for your whole team.

If you want to get a feel for what the day will be like, you can watch the videos of last year’s talks

Tickets for last year’s Patterns Day went fairly fast—the Duke of York’s doesn’t have a huge capacity—so don’t dilly-dally too long before grabbing your ticket!

Friday, December 14th, 2018

GitHub - frctl/awesome-fractal: A curated list of awesome things related to Fractal

A starter list of Fractal examples and links. You can expand it.

Tuesday, August 21st, 2018

Mozilla Protocol - Protocol Design System

Mozilla’s work-in-progress style guide and pattern library.

Wednesday, July 25th, 2018

The history of design systems at Clearleft

Danielle has posted a brief update on Fractal:

We decided to ask the Fractal community for help, and the response has been overwhelming. We’ve received so many offers of support in all forms that we can safely say that development will be starting up again shortly.

It’s so gratifying to see that other people are finding Fractal to be as useful to them as it is to us. We very much appreciate all their support!

Although Fractal itself is barely two years old, it’s part of a much longer legacy at Clearleft…

It all started with Natalie. She gave a presentation back in 2009 called Practical Maintainable CSS . She talks about something called a pattern porfolio—a deliverable that expresses every component and documents how the markup and CSS should be used.

When Anna was interning at Clearleft, she was paired up with Natalie so she was being exposed to these ideas. She then expanded on them, talking about Front-end Style Guides. She literally wrote the book on the topic, and starting curating the fantastic collection of examples at styleguides.io.

When Paul joined Clearleft, it was a perfect fit. He was already obsessed with style guides (like the BBC’s Global Experience Language) and started writing and talking about styleguides for the web:

At Clearleft, rather than deliver an inflexible set of static pages, we present our code as a series of modular components (a ‘pattern portfolio’) that can be assembled into different configurations and page layouts as required.

Such systematic thinking was instigated by Natalie, yet this is something we continually iterate upon.

To see the evolution of Paul’s thinking, you can read his three part series from last year on designing systems:

  1. Theory, Practice, and the Unfortunate In-between,
  2. Layers of Longevity, and
  3. Components and Composition

Later, Charlotte joined Clearleft as a junior developer, and up until that point, hadn’t been exposed to the idea of pattern libraries or design systems. But it soon became clear that she had found her calling. She wrote a brilliant article for A List Apart called From Pages to Patterns: An Exercise for Everyone and she started speaking about design systems at conferences like Beyond Tellerrand. Here, she acknowledges the changing terminology over the years:

Pattern portfolio is a term used by Natalie Downe when she started using the technique at Clearleft back in 2009.

Front-end style guides is another term I’ve heard a lot.

Personally, I don’t think it matters what you call your system as long as it’s appropriate to the project and everyone uses it. Today I’m going to use the term “pattern library”.

(Mark was always a fan of the term “component library”.)

Now Charlotte is a product manager at Ansarada in Sydney and the product she manages is …the design system!

Thinking back to my work on starting design systems, I didn’t realise straight away that I was working on a product. Yet, the questions we ask are similar to those we ask of any product when we start out. We make decisions on things like: design, architecture, tooling, user experience, code, releases, consumption, communication, and more.

It’s been fascinating to watch the evolution of design systems at Clearleft, accompanied by an evolution in language: pattern portfolios; front-end style guides; pattern libraries; design systems.

There’s been a corresponding evolution in prioritisation. Where Natalie was using pattern portfolios as a deliverable for handover, Danielle is now involved in the integration of design systems within a client’s team. The focus on efficiency and consistency that Natalie began is now expressed in terms of design ops—creating living systems that everyone is involved in.

When I step back and look at the history of design systems on the web, there are some obvious names that have really driven their evolution and adoption, like Jina Anne, Brad Frost, and Alla Kholmatova. But I’m amazed at the amount of people who have been through Clearleft’s doors that have contributed so, so much to this field:

Natalie Downe, Anna Debenham, Paul Lloyd, Mark Perkins, Charlotte Jackson, and Danielle Huntrods …thank you all!

Beyond style guides: lessons from scaling design at TELUS

I like the questions that the TELUS team ask about any potential components to be added to their design system:

  1. Is it on brand?
  2. Is it accessible?
  3. Has it been tested?
  4. Can it be reused?

They also have design principles.

Tuesday, June 26th, 2018

Introducing the GOV.UK Design System - Government Digital Service

The Gov.uk design system is looking very, very good indeed—nicely organised with plenty of usage guidelines for every component.

Guidance on using components and patterns now follow a simple, consistent format based on task-based research into what users need in order to follow and trust an approach.

Monday, June 25th, 2018

Why Design Systems Fail by Una Kravets

I’m at An Event Apart Boston where Una is about to talk about design systems, following on from Yesenia’s excellent design systems talk. I’m going to attempt to liveblog it…

Una works at the Bustle Digital Group, which publishes a lot of different properties. She used to work at Watson, at Bluemix and at Digital Ocean. They all have something in common (other than having blue in their logos). They all had design systems that failed.

Design systems are so hot right now. They allow us think in a componentised way, and grow quickly. There are plenty of examples out there, like Polaris from Shopify, the Lightning design sytem from Salesforce, Garden from Zendesk, Gov.uk, and Code For America. Check out Anna’s excellent styleguides.io for more examples.

What exactly is a design system?

It’s a broad term. It can be a styleguide or visual pattern library. It can be design tooling (like a Sketch file). It can be a component library. It can be documentation of design or development usage. It can be voice and tone guidelines.

Styleguides

When Una was in College, she had a print rebranding job—letterheads, stationary, etc. She also had to provide design guidelines. She put this design guide on the web. It had colours, heading levels, type, logo treatments, and so on. It wasn’t for an application, but it was a design system.

Design tooling

Primer by Github is a good example of this. You can download pre-made icons, colours, etc.

Component library

This is where you get the code. Una worked on BUI at Digital Ocean, which described the interaction states of each components and how to customise interactions with JavaScript.

Code usage guidelines

AirBnB has a really good example of this. It’s a consistent code style. You can even include it in your build step with eslint-config-airbnb and stylelint-config-airbnb.

Design usage documentation

Carbon by IBM does a great job of this. It describes the criteria for deciding when to use a pattern. It’s driven by user experience considerations. They also have general guidelines on loading in components—empty states, etc. And they include animation guidelines (separately from Carbon), built on the history of IBM’s magnetic tape machines and typewriters.

Voice and tone guidelines

Of course Mailchimp is the classic example here. They break up voice and tone. Voice is not just what the company is, but what the company is not:

  • Fun but not silly,
  • Confident but not cocky,
  • Smart but not stodgy,
  • and so on.

Voiceandtone.com describes the user’s feelings at different points and how to communicate with them. There are guidelines for app users, and guidelines for readers of the company newsletter, and guidelines for readers of the blog, and so on. They even have examples of when things go wrong. The guidelines provide tips on how to help people effectively.

Why do design systems fail?

Una now asks who in the room has ever started a diet. And who has ever finished a diet? (A lot of hands go down).

Nobody uses it

At Digital Ocean, there was a design system called Buoy version 1. Una helped build a design system called Float. There was also a BUI version 2. Buoy was for product, Float was for the marketing site. Classic example of 927. Nobody was using them.

Una checked the CSS of the final output and the design system code only accounted for 28% of the codebase. Most of the CSS was over-riding the CSS in the design system.

Happy design systems scale good standards, unify component styles and code and reduce code cruft. Why were people adding on instead of using the existing sytem? Because everyone was being judged on different metrics. Some teams were judged on shipping features rather than producing clean code. So the advantages of a happy design systems don’t apply to them.

Investment

It’s like going to the gym. Small incremental changes make a big difference over the long term. If you just work out for three months and then stop, you’ll lose all your progress. It’s like that with design systems. They have to stay in sync with the live site. If you don’t keep it up to date, people just won’t use it.

It’s really important to have a solid core. Accessibility needs to be built in from the start. And the design system needs ownership and dedicated commitment. That has to come from the organisation.

You have to start somewhere.

Communication

Communication is multidimensional; it’s not one-way. The design system owner (or team) needs to act as a bridge between designers and developers. Nobody likes to be told what to do. People need to be involved, and feel like their needs are being addressed. Make people feel like they have control over the process …even if they don’t; it’s like perceived performance—this is perceived involvement.

Ask. Listen. Make your users feel heard. Incorporate feedback.

Buy-in

Good communication is important for getting buy-in from the people who will use the design system. You also need buy-in from the product owners.

Showing is more powerful than telling. Hackathans are like candy to a budding design system—a chance to demonstrate the benefits of a design system (and get feedback). After a hackathon at Digital Ocean, everyone was talking about the design system. Weeks afterwards, one of the developers replaced Bootstrap with BUI, removing 20,000 lines of code! After seeing the impact of a design system, the developers will tell their co-workers all about it.

Solid architecture

You need to build with composability and change in mind. Primer, by Github, has a core package, and then add-ons for, say, marketing or product. That separation of concerns is great. BUI used a similar module-based approach: a core codebase, separate from iconography and grid.

Semantic versioning is another important part of having a solid architecture for your design system. You want to be able to push out minor updates without worrying about breaking changes.

Major.Minor.Patch

Use the same convention in your design files, like Sketch.

What about tech stack choice? Every company has different needs, but one thing Una recommends is: don’t wait to namespace! All your components should have some kind of prefix in the class names so they don’t clash with existing CSS.

Una mentions Solid by Buzzfeed, which I personally think is dreadful (count the number of !important declarations—you can call it “immutable” all you want).

AtlasKit by Atlassian goes all in on React. They’re trying to integrate Sketch into it, but design tooling isn’t solved yet (AirBnB are working on this too). We’re still trying to figure out how to merge the worlds of design and code.

Reduce Friction

This is what it’s all about. Using the design system has to be the path of least resistance. If the new design system is harder to use than what people are already doing, they won’t use it.

Provide hooks and tools for the people who will be using the design system. That might be mixins in Sass or it might be a script on a CDN that people can just link to.

Start early, update often. Design systems can be built retrospectively but it’s easier to do it when a new product is being built.

Bugs and cruft always increase over time. You need a mechanism in place to keep on top of it. Not just technical bugs, but visual inconsistencies.

So the five pillars of ensuring a successful design system are:

  1. Investment
  2. Communication
  3. Buy-in
  4. Solid architecture
  5. Reduce friction

When you’re starting, begin with a goal:

We are building a design system because…

Then review what you’ve already got (your existing codebase). For example, if the goal of having a design system is to increase page performance, use Web Page Test to measure how the current site is performing. If the goal is to reduce accessibility problems, use webaim.org to measure the accessibility of your current site (see also: pa11y). If the goal is to reduce the amount of CSS in your codebase, use cssstats.com to test how your current site is doing. Now that you’ve got stats, use them to get buy-in. You can also start by doing an interface inventory. Print out pages and cut them up.

Once you’ve got buy-in and commitment (in writing), then you can make technical decisions.

You can start with your atomic elements. Buttons are like the “Hello world!” of design systems. You’ve colours, type, and different states.

Then you can compose elements by putting the base elements together.

Do you include layout in the system? That’s a challenge, and it depends on your team. If you do include layout, to what extent?

Regardless of layout, you still need to think about space: the space between base elements within a component.

Bake in accessibility: every hover state should have an equal (not opposite) focus state.

Think about states, like loading states.

Then you can start documenting. Then inform the users of the system. Carbon has a dashboard showing which components are new, which components are deprecated, and which components are being updated.

Keep consistent communication. Design and dev communication has to happen. Continuous iteration, support and communication are the most important factors in the success of a design system. Code is only 10% of a sytem.

Also, don’t feel like you need to copy other design systems out there. Your needs are probably very different. As Diana says, comparing your design system to the polished public ones is like comparing your life to someone’s Instagram account. To that end, Una says something potentially contraversial:

You might not need a design sytem.

If you’re the only one at your organisation that cares about the benefits of a design system, you won’t get buy-in, and if you don’t get buy-in, the design system will fail. Maybe there’s something more appropriate for your team? After all, not everyone needs to go to the gym to get fit. There are alternatives.

Find what works for you and keep at it.