Among the many (many, many) points Ursula Franklin makes in The Real World of Technology, she suggests that technology is best understood not as software or gadgets, but as a practice: as a way of doing something.
It’s fairly possible to judge a component and say that it’s easy to implement it in HTML&CSS. I agree, it’s easy when you are working for practice purposes only, but for a real-life project, it’s completely different. The perfect responsive component that you just built will fail quickly in case it was used for a real-life project with real content. Why? It’s because judging on how a component can be built without considering the edge cases.
A lesson that we’ve learned at Shopify from building Polaris is that maintaining a system takes more effort than building it. That’s because design systems inevitably create debt. Components will be used and forked in unpredictable ways. Dependencies can make it difficult to predictably make a change. We ran into these issues while rolling out a new design language for Shopify’s admin in October. The time it took to test the impact of a small visual change across the product slowed down the rollout.
In her article, Jess Sattell discusses the importance of establishing a standardized lexicon within design systems to ensure clarity of communication and intention. She presents a framework for creating meaningful names, terms, and definitions within design teams, emphasizing the need for observation, discussion, and collaboration in the design process.
Join the Design Systems community on Slack!
3,000 Vector Illustrations For Interface and UX Design
Design System Checklist
The design systems we swim in. — Ethan Marcotte
How Complex Systems Fail
The Art of Building Real-life Components
Design systems need experience foundations | by Yesenia Perez-Cruz | Nov, 2020 | Shopify UX
Adactio: Journal—Declarative design systems
shaper — interface styles shaper
Components | The Component Gallery
Home | The Component Gallery
Design System Metrics Collection - Design strategy guide
Designing design systems: A framework for names, terms, and definitions