![]() ![]() At one point, we counted 22 different design systems floating around. But this extremely decentralized, “everyone make your own” approach wasn’t sustainable. We wanted to make it possible for listeners to access Spotify anywhere.Ī lot of great work went into these ground-up efforts, and we’re still using parts of these systems today. This was in part due to a new company strategy: ubiquity. Now we were also designing for cars, smartwatches, speakers, and even smart fridges. The days of designing for mobile and desktop were long gone. In 2018, Spotify continued to grow, and fast. After a while, we saw that having a centralized design systems team didn’t fit with this way of working. Spotify values “aligned autonomy” and empowers teams (squads) to make their own decisions. Why? It comes down to how the organization is set up. This was great for consistency, and many companies find that a centralized team works for them. ![]() ![]() The team refreshed Spotify’s look and feel, standardized many of our components across mobile and desktop, and grew from a handful of people to 30+ full-time engineers and designers.īut there was a catch: GLUE was a single, centralized team. ![]() It’s possible to adjust and extend components to make them work in a variety of contexts.The GLUE design system was a success in lots of ways. It’s possible to create new components by combining existing components. Modularity helps to create reusable and interchangeable components. Modular components are self-contained - they don’t have any dependencies. To be reusable and scalable, components need to be the following: It’s recommended to develop components that are not tied to a single-use case but can be reused in multiple contexts. High reusability allows designers and developers to use Material Design as the foundation for their products. If we analyze any successful design system like Material Design, we notice that such systems are highly reusable. As a result, the system becomes inflexible, and its users (designers and developers) have to create new components each time they need to cover a new scenario. Many design systems suffer from the duplication of functional elements- team members create components that are too focused on a single-use case. Use a tool like CSS Stats to see how many unique colors, typefaces you have in your style sheets. It’s essential to identify principal UI properties such as colors, fonts, imagery first, and only then, analyze how these properties are to be used in the components. Identify the most important and most used elements and components of the product.Ī UI audit is a multi-step process.Highlight the areas with the most significant inconsistencies within the product.You need to look at the visual qualities of your design elements. That’s why classifying all the visual components within the product should be the first task that the design team does before building a design system. Identifying duplication of design elements helps a team to avoid the scenario in which team members build an element from scratch only to find that a similar version of it already exists. One of the most dangerous problems in product design is design duplication, which leads to fragmentation, and fragmentation leads to inconsistency. Design principles reflect the shared beliefs of the design team. Styles guides should be created in consideration of brand values (i.e., using brand colors for functional elements such as call-to-action buttons).ĭesign principles are the guiding rules that help the teams to make meaningful design decisions. Style guides are deliverables that focus on graphic styles (colors, fonts, illustrations) and their usage. Design system designer manual#Patterns are the protocols that provide a form of construction manual for designers to refer to when using components. Combined, the components form libraries that designers refer to and use when they create products. Think of them as building blocks of your design system. However, there are some elements that many design systems share:Ĭomponents are functional elements of design. Every organization has different needs, and it’s impossible to provide a universal list of elements that every design system should use. Many designers find themselves wondering about what they should include in their Design System. Think of a design system as a single source of truth for the product teams allowing them to design and develop products. A design system is a collection of reusable components, guided by clear practices, enables a product team to create a product faster. ![]()
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