Selecting a framework for your design system is a crucial decision. This choice will significantly impact the system’s usability and maintainability as your component library grows and adoption increases. While often overlooked, careful consideration upfront can save time and resources in the long run. Understanding Your Users As a product designed for internal teams and … Read more
In the realm of web accessibility, color contrast is not just about aesthetics; it is a fundamental requirement. This article focuses on the technical aspects of color contrast, particularly for interactive elements in different states like hover and focus. Finally we will explore whether these states need to meet specific contrast criteria to ensure WCAG … Read more
Without an effective plan to communicate what happens within your Design System, you’re not reaching everyone you should and missing out on valuable feedback and showcasing your Design System’s value. Communicating what the Governance does and what the Design System offers is the way you ensure consumers know about what you do so they can … Read more
Why would a happily married man read a book about dating and finding love ? I’ve found my partner and have my family after all. But there is something very interesting about human relationships : all the different kinds of relationships we are function in similar ways. What makes good friends also makes good romantic … Read more
Here’s the tale of how fixing what was supposed to be an easy-to-fix accessibility issue turned out to be a challenge thanks to Angular and how I overcame it… Sort of! What are bypass blocks? If you’ve looked into web accessibility before there’s a good chance you’ve heard about bypass blocks before, maybe called skip … Read more
Naming things is hard, and having everyone agree on a shared language is even harder. Discussions can be very messy when the thing everyone calls a spinner is named a loader in the design system, or when nobody is really clear on what the body of a product card really is. Today I’ll show you … Read more
It would seem impossible to reconcile the thoughts of ancient stoic philosophers with the work of modern-day workers creating digital products… But somehow the principles and practices that guided philosophy teacher Zeno or Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius are applicable in our lives as contributors to design systems. Written in Latin, the mantras I’m about to … Read more
Almost anyone working with Design Systems knows about Atomic Design, but most often Atoms and Molecules get all the attention. Today we’ll look at the other hand of the spectrum: templates and pages, and how to present them best. Here’s a list of ten examples to inspire you to improve your own design systems. They’re … Read more
Carbon is a very impressive design system, with slick components and comprehensive guidelines for writing, designing, and developing for IBM. To ensure everyone gets to find all this great content when they need it they’ve used several navigation patterns that you may want to implement in your own projects. To further illustrate how to reuse … Read more
Words are everywhere and a Content Strategy is a plan to make sure that the copy all teams write for their products fits the company’s principles and values. Surprisingly, despite its importance, copywriting is often forgotten when it comes to designing and documenting components. I browsed hundreds of design systems, seeing so many missed opportunities … Read more