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Stuart Robson rolls up his sleeves and begins to piece together the jigsaw puzzle that is design tokens and component based design. Starting with the corners, and working around the edges, Stu helps us to piece together a full picture of a modern design system.

If you stare at your twitter feed long enough, it can look like everyone is talking about Design Systems. In some cases you could be persuaded to think how shallow the term can go.

“Isn’t this what we called Style Guides?”, “Here’s my React Design System”, “I’ve just updated the Design System in Sketch”

To me, they are some and all of these things. Over the last 4 years of consulting with two clients on their Design System, my own view has changed a little.

If you dig a little deeper into Design Systems twitter you will probably see the term “Design Tokens” pop up at least once a day somewhere. Design Tokens came out of work that was being done at Salesforce with Jina and others who pioneered the creation of Design Tokens as we know them today – creating the first command line tool in Theo that had started the adoption of Design Tokens to the wider Design Systems Community.

A cool term but, what are they?

If you look at your client work, your companies site, the project you’re working on you should notice some parts of the page have a degree of consistency: the background colour of your form buttons is the same colour as your link text, or your text has the same margin, or your card elements have the same spacing as your media object.

These are design decisions, and they should be littered across the overall design of your project. These decisions might start off in a Sketch file and make their way into code from detailed investigation of a Sketch file, or you may find that the design evolves from your design application once it gets into code.

These design decisions can change, and to keep them synchronised across design and development in applications, as well as a larger documentation site in your Design System, is going to take some effort.

This is where Design Tokens come in, and I find the best way to succinctly reiterate what they are is via the two following quotes…

“Design Tokens are an abstraction for everything impacting the visual design of an app/platform.”
– Sönke Rohde

…and

“We use them in place of hard-coded values in order to maintain a scale-able and consistent visual system.”
– Jina

There are several global design decisions that we can abstract to create a top level design token – Sizing, Font Families, Font Styles, Font Weights, Font Sizes, Line Heights, Border Styles, Border Colours, Border Radius, Horizontal Rule Colours, Background Colours, Gradients, Background Gradients, Box Shadows, Filters, Text Colours, Text Shadow, Time, Media Queries, Z Index, Icons – these can all be abstracted as required.

So, spicy Sass variables?

We can look at Design Tokens as an abstraction of CSS, sort of like Sass variables, but spicier. Looking at them like this we can see that they are (in either .yaml or .json) a group of related key value pairs with more information that can be added as needed.

The great thing with abstracting design decisions outside of your CSS pre-processor is that you’re not tying those decisions to one platform or codebase.

As a crude example, we can see here that we are defining a name and a value that could then become our color, background-color, or border-color, and more.

# Colours
# -------
- name: color-red
  value: #FF0000
- name: color-green
  value: #00FF00
- name: color-blue
  value: #0000FF
- name: color-white
  value: #FFFFFF
- name: color-black
  value: #000000

These can then generate our Sass variables (as an example) for our projects.

$color-red: #FF0000 !default;
$color-green: #00FF00 !default;
$color-blue: #0000FF !default;
$color-white: #FFFFFF !default;
$color-black: #000000 !default;

Why are they so good

Ok, so we now know what Design Tokens are, but why do we need them? What makes them better than our existing solutions (css pre-processors) for defining these design decisions?

I think there are 5 really good reasons why we all should start abstracting these design decisions away from the CSS that they may live in. Some of these reasons are similar to reasons some developers use a pre-processor like Sass, but with added bonuses.

Consistency

Much like using a CSS pre-processor or using CSS custom properties, being able to define a background colour, breakpoint, or font-size in more than one place using the same key ensures that we are using the Sass values across the entire product suite we are developing for.

Using our Design Tokens in their generated formats, we can be sure to not end up with 261 shades of blue.

Maintainability

By using a pre-processor like Sass, or using native CSS custom properties, we can already have maintainable code in our projects. Design Tokens also do this at the abstracted level as well.

Scalability

“Design Tokens enable us to scale our Design across all the permutations.”
– Jina

At this point, we’re only talking about abstracting the design decisions for use in CSS. Having Design Tokens allows design to scale for multiple brands or multiple projects as needed.

The main benefit of Design Tokens in regards to scalability is the option that it gives us to offer the Design Tokens for other platforms and frameworks as needed. With some of the tools available, we can even have these Tokens shared between applications used by designers and developers.

Your marketing site and your iOS application can soon share the same design decisions codified, and you can move towards creating an Android app or web application as required.

Documentation

If we abstract the design decisions from one platform specific programming language it would be no good if it wasn’t made to be easily accessible.

The tools and applications available that are mentioned later in this article can now create their own documentation, or allow you to create your own. This documentation is either hosted within a web-based application or can be self-hosted with the rest of your Design Systems documentation.

Most of the command line tools go further and allow you do add more details that you wish to convey in the documentation, making it as unique as it is required for your project.

Empowerment

When you abstract your design decisions to Design Tokens, you can help empower other people on the project. With the tools available today, and the tools that are just around the corner, we can have these design decisions determined by anyone on the team.

No-one necessarily needs to understand how to set up the codebase to update the colour slightly. Some of the tools I mention later on allow you to update the Design Tokens in the browser.

Design Systems are already “bridging the gap” between design and development. With Design Tokens and the tooling available, we can create better team relationships by closing that gap instead.

Some of the benefits of creating and using Design Tokens are the same as using a pre-processor when it comes to authoring CSS. I feel the added bonuses of being able to empower other team members and document how you use them, as well as the fundamental reasoning in that they can be platform agnostic, are all great “selling points” to why you need to start using Design Tokens today.

Tools

There are several tools available to help you and your team to create the required files from your abstracted Design Tokens:

Command Line Tools

There are several tools available on the command line that can be used as part of, or separate to, your development process.

These tools allow you to define the Design Tokens in a .json or .yaml file format which can then be compiled into the formats you require.

Some have built in functions to turn the inputted values to something different when compiled – for example, turning hexadecimal code that is a Design Token into a RGB value in your .css file. These command line tools, written in JavaScript, allow you to create your own ways in which you want things transformed.

My current client has certain design decisions for typography in long form content (font size, weight, line height and margins) which need to be together to make sense. Being able to write JavaScript to compile these design decisions into an independent Sass map for each element allows us to develop with assurance that the long form content has the correct styling.

WYSIWYG Tools

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get Tools) have been around for almost as long as we have been able to make websites. I can just about remember using Dreamweaver 2, before I knew what a <table> was.

When browsers started to employ vendor prefixes to new CSS for their browsers, a flurry of online WYSIWYG tools came with it built in. They’re still there, but the industry has moved on.

Design Tokens also have a few WYSIWYG tools available. From simpler online tools that allow you to generate the correct Sass variables needed for your design decisions to tools that store your decisions online and allow you to export them as npm packages.

These types of tools for creating Design Tokens can help empower the team as a whole, with some automatically creating documentation which can easily be shared with a url.

Retrofitting Tools

If you are starting from scratch on a new re-design or on a new project that requires a Design System and Tokens, the many of the tools mentioned above will help you along your way. But what if you’re in the middle of a project, or you have to maintain something and want to start to create the parts required for a Design System?

Luckily there are several tools and techniques to help you make a start.

One new tool that might be useful is Superposition. Currently in private beta with the public release set for Q1 of 2020 Superposition helps you “Extract design tokens from websites and use them in code and in your design tool.”

Entering your domain gives you a nice visual documentation of your sites styles as Design Tokens. These can then be exported as Sass Variables, CSS Custom Properties, JavaScript with the team working on exports to iOS and Android.

If you have an existing site, this could be a good first step before moving to one of the other tools mentioned above.

You could also make use of CSSStats or Project Wallace’s Analysis page that I mentioned earlier. This would give you an indication of what Design Tokens you would need to implement.

Component Based Design

So, we’ve created our Design Tokens by abstracting the design decisions of brand colours, typography, spacing and more. Is that as far as we can go?

Levels of Design Decisions

Once we have created our first set of Design Tokens for our project, we can take it that little bit deeper. With command line tools and some of the applications available, you can link these more global decisions to a more deeper level.

For example, you can take your chosen colours and make further design decisions on the themes of your project, such as what the primary, secondary, or tertiary colours are or what your general component and layout spacing will be.

With this, we can go one step further. We could also define some component specific design decisions that can then be compiled for the developer to use. Invest in time to check over the designs with a fine toothcomb and make sure you are using the correct Sass variable or CSS custom property for that component.

If you are going more than one or two levels of design decision making, you can compile each set of these Design Tokens to your Sass variables which can then be used as required. So you can provide: global, theme, component level Sass variables which can be used in the project. Or you could choose to only compile what you need for the components you are creating.

Variables, Maps, Custom Properties

Some of the tools available for creating and maintaining your Design Tokens allow you to compile to certain programming languages.

With my current client work, I am making use of Sass variables, Sass maps, and CSS custom properties. The Design Tokens are compiled into one or more of these options depending on how they will be used.

Colours are compiled as global Sass variables, inside of a couple of Sass maps and CSS custom properties. Our macro layout breakpoints are defined as a single Sass map.

If we know we are creating a component that has the ability to be themed, we can make use of CSS custom properties to reduce the amount of CSS we need to override, and also allow us to inline things that can be changed via a CMS as required. Which leaves us using Sass variables for parts of a component that won’t change. We are using Sass maps differently still. As mentioned, we generate a Sass map containing the design decisions for each element of text, and we can use long form text. This Sass map is then compiled into separate CSS declarations as needed using Sass mixins.

I find the beauty of being able to make use of the global, themed, and component level design decisions by compiling them into various formats (that essentially become CSS) and that gives us more power in authoring components.

Creating Consistent Utility Classes

As you have created your more global generic design decisions, you can create your own small set of utility classes.

Using a pre-processor like Sass you can define a set of mixins and functions that can take your Design Tokens that have been compiled down into variables and maps and generate separate classes for each design decision.

By making tokens available to all digital teams, we can enable them to create custom experiences that are aligned to current visual standards when a component does not (or will not) exist in the design system. Maya King

In creating utility classes with Design Tokens (using something like Sass) you have consistency with the overall Design System for times when you or a team need to create a one-off component for a project.

These exceptions tend to be something that won’t make it as part of the overall Design System, but it still needs that look and feel.

Having classes available that we can guarantee use the generic, global design decisions from the Design Tokens means these one-off components should be well on their way to have the overall look and feel of the project, and will get any updates with little to no additional overhead.

Wrapping Up

I think we are starting to see the potential of using Design Tokens as Design Systems become even more popular. I think that, from this overview, we can see how they can help us close the gap that still exists in places between the designers and developers on the team. They can help empower people who do not code to make changes that can be automatically updating live work.

I think you can start now. You may not have or need what you could term “a fully-fledged Design System” but this small step will help move towards one in the future and give you instant benefits of consistency and maintainability now. If you want more Design Tokens, as well as the links that are dotted around this article I also maintain a GitHub repo of Awesome Design Tokens which I try to keep updated with links to tools, articles, examples, videos, and anything else that’s related to Design Tokens.

About the author

Stuart Robson is a freelance front-end developer and design systems advocate who curates the design systems newsletter - news.design.systems

More articles by Stuart

Jina Anne silences the night to talk about how we talk about Design Systems. Can the language we use impact the effectiveness of the solution? Fear not, if mighty dread has seized your troubled mind. Design systems of great joy we bring to you and all mankind.

Ooh, clickbaity title. Why on earth would I, a self-proclaimed “design systems advocate”, say there is no design system? Yes, I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek. Maybe I just wanted an excuse to use the “there is no spoon” gif. But I do have an actual point, so bear with me.

Design systems as a “thing” vs design systems as a methodology

Recently I tweeted my thoughts on why I have been tending to use design systems in plural form (rather than using an article like “a” or “the” in front of it). During my time at Salesforce when our team was called “Design Systems” and my role was “Lead Designer, Design Systems”, I would get asked “Why is it plural? We only have one.”.

My thoughts:

I liked my title at Salesforce as “Lead Designer, Design Systems”.

People asked, but it’s just one. Why plural?

“A design system” or “The design system” makes people think of a deliverable artifact/library.

But it’s ongoing design systems work. Process improvement & workflows.

— design systems jina (@jina) December 12, 2019

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we talk about design systems, including the confusion and negativity that can come along with it. Amélie Lamont gave a talk in 2018 called “The Language of Design”, and in it, she talked about the way we talk about design systems and design itself from a “jargony point of view”. She argues that design is technically problem-solving.

I definitely agree. People get caught up in “design” as the actual role or action of designing and have even taken issue with the term “design systems” for this very reason (and have suggested it be more focused on code). I don’t think it really does us a good service to just swap out one role for the other. And… is it even about the role?

For other folks, which I include myself, we see design as a larger effort that involves the end-user experience (which includes usability, accessibility, performance, etc) as well as having a huge impact on the business. This includes code.

But really, it should all be focused on people. I like Mina Markham’s definition of what makes for good art direction in design systems:

Art direction is progressive. Localized. Cross-functional. Inclusive. Systematic.

Mina Markham

You’ll notice that the emphasis of what she speaks about is on people.

So in the design systems work we do, you often think of a style guide. Or a component library. Or a Sketch UI Kit. And there are arguments on whether either of those things can be called a design system if it doesn’t include this other thing or that other thing. We even talk about whether design systems are products or are more of a service. My take? The word “design” and “system” used in combination together literally just means to systemize your design (and in my world view that is more about the overall experience). And so if for you that means a Sketch UI Library, then you do you! My point is I think there is too much focus on the deliverables in the first place.

I touched on this briefly very recently:

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about is how much time we spend on making beautiful design system websites. I love looking at them. They’re great. But as our design and engineering tools get closer and closer together, will we come to a point where we don’t need the website? Can our tools surface suggestions for better accessibility, localization, performance, and usability, because our design system is baked into the tools? Just a thought.

Quote from post in Smarter Design Systems Tools

Invisible Design Systems?

So this is something I am striving for in 2020 — in what ways can we improve our collaboration, remove any proverbial gaps between design and engineering (not just bridge them), and have more meaningful conversations around the work we do? I don’t have any wrong or right answers here, but I am looking forward to seeing this progress in our field.

Design tools are bringing in smarter, automated ways to check for color contrast and other accessibility issues that can be detected early on. Sketch just announced their Assistant feature planned for 2020, which will check for your visual design discrepancies. And some design tools are using real code to be used in your product.

Engineering tools are advancing every day as well. I was just attending Flutter Interact recently, which was an event held by Google about their Flutter UI toolkit. It previously enabled you to get apps built for native platforms like Android and iOS, from one code base, and now has also announced their support for desktop and web. The push at this year’s event was focused on making this approachable for creatives (with their integrations into tools like Adobe XD. It really does feel like design and engineering tools are coming closer and closer together. And that’s all really cool and exciting.

However, I have to tell you: a lot of the time that I’m working in design systems, I’m not even touching a design tool. Or coding. Rather, it’s a lot of people-focused work: Reviewing. Advising. Organizing. Coordinating. Triaging. Educating. Supporting. That’s a lot of invisible systems work right there. (I use “invisible” here to mean there is not a direct tangible object in some of this work, though it all does serve the end-user through the product outcomes).

Designed objects are the fruit of invisible systems.

Amélie Lamont

This definitely is not me saying “don’t build a style guide” or “don’t make a Sketch UI Kit”. Use whatever works best for your organization. But this essentially is a plea to always put the focus on the people using your products. And, think about design systems as more of a methodology. A shining example of this way of designing systems is the newly released Encore from Spotify. I had the opportunity to see this revealed at Design Systems London, and they just published a post on it recently.

What’s different about Encore is that it isn’t a single monolithic thing. It’s a framework that brings Spotify’s existing design systems under one brand—a “system of systems.”

Source: Reimagining Design Systems at Spotify

This design systems work is not about one style guide website and instead focuses on the needs across several systems that are connected. Design Tokens help this to be a reality. Needless to say, I’m a big fan.

Love for your community

Design system principle #4: Favor community over control.

— Nathan Curtis (@nathanacurtis) March 23, 2017

When you’re doing design systems work in your organization, you are actually building a community. This can involve shared language and nomenclature, an aligned purpose, and better, closer collaboration. It doesn’t have to be a “style police” situation (I actually very much dislike the term “governance”). This can be a joint effort – working together to share the ownership of design systems together.

I was a big fan of the pairing model that we had at Salesforce when I was there. The work we did in design systems informed the work our product designers did. But then the work that the product designers did, in turn, informed the work we did in design systems. It was a very cyclical model and combined Nathan Curtis’s observed models of the Centralized Team and the Federated Contributors.

From my experience, I have found that great design systems teams have hybrid skillsets. Whether that is having actual hybrid designer/engineers on the team, or just ensuring that those skillsets are represented across the team, it’s important to have the perspectives of design, engineering, product, content, accessibility, and more.

I think that part of a designer’s role – and not even a designer. Anybody who uses the design system by nature of what a design system is – it’s the conglomeration of all the disciplines. Some code, some design, some product knowledge, some writing. And what that means is I think everybody on the team has to approach it with some humility.

Dan Mall

Kim Williams spoke recently in her talk, Start with your Brand Purpose, on Design Systems Love:

Love is patient. With design systems, …it’s a marathon and not a sprint. …this is a long game and it is a labor of love. And love is kind. We support everyone through change. Internally change is so hard. How do you help engineers work in a different way, how do you help PMs think strategically and embrace a new definition of analytical, how do you make in-roads with marketing so that they’re comfortable with you talking about brand and that you’re comfortable with marketing talking about user experience? How do you really, really build those relationships up through empathy. …the onus is on us to educate, to facilitate, to help others understand, to speak the language, to be that bridge, to be that connector, to be that catalyst for our companies. It always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Never fails. I love this because there’s a resiliency that we need to have, a resilience when we go through this.

Kim Williams

I love, love, love that.

And so while I still think it’s fun to explore new tools and get really excited about certain processes, at the end of the day, (in my most humble opinion), the best design systems teams are not just hybrid teams — they are also teams that work and supports each other really well, thus producing amazing user-centered work.

So, my suggestion for the coming year is to perhaps move away from thinking of design systems as an actual thing (especially when it comes to the negative perception of spending time on them) and more as a way of working better, more efficiently, and more creatively so that we can build great experiences for our users. I like to repeat in my work, Design Systems are for people, because it is a call to cherish, support, and empower the people you serve (both internally and externally).

Happy holidays!

About the author

Jina is a design systems advocate and coach. At Amazon, Jina was Senior Design Systems Lead. At Salesforce, she was Lead Designer on the Lightning Design System. She led the CSS architecture and style guide for the Apple Online Store. She’s also worked at GitHub, Engine Yard, Crush + Lovely, and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and more. She developed projects with W3C, Mass.gov, FedEx, etc.

Jina coauthored Design Systems Handbook, Fancy Form Design, and The Art & Science of CSS. She’s published several articles. She’s spoken at conferences including Adobe MAX. Print Magazine featured Jina as a leading San Francisco creative.

More articles by Jina

Amy Hupe prepares a four bird roast of tasty treats so we can learn how the needs of many different types of users can be served through careful implementation of components within a design system.

Design systems help us to make our products consistent, and to make sure we’re creating them in the most efficient way possible. They also help us to ensure our products are designed and built to a high quality; that they’re not only consistent in appearance, and efficiently-built, but that they are good. And good design means accessible design.

1 in 5 people in the UK have a long term illness, impairment or disability – and many more have a temporary disability. Designing accessible services is incredibly important from an ethical, reputational and commercial standpoint. For EU government websites and apps, accessibility is also a legal requirement.

With that in mind, I’ll explain the four main ways I think we can use design systems to promote accessible design within an organisation, and what design systems can’t do.

1. Bake it in

Design systems typically provide guidance and examples to aid the design process, showing what best practice looks like. Many design systems also encompass code that teams can use to take these elements into production. This gives us an opportunity to build good design into the foundations of our products, not just in terms of how they look, but also how they work. For everyone.

Let me give an example.

The GOV.UK Design System contains a component called the Summary list. It’s used in a few different contexts on GOV.UK, to summarise information. It’s often used at the end of a long or complex form, to let users check their answers before they send them, like this:

Users can review the information and, if they’ve entered something incorrectly, they can go back and edit their answer by clicking the “Change” link on the right-hand side. This works well if you can see the change link, because you can see which information it corresponds to.

In the top row, for example, I can see that the link is giving me the option to change the name I’ve entered because I can see the name label, and the name I put in is next to it.

However, if you’re using a screen reader, this link – and all the others – will just say “change”, and it becomes harder to tell what you’re selecting. So to help with this, the GOV.UK Design System team added some visually-hidden text to the code in the example, to make the link more descriptive.

Sighted users won’t see this text, but when a screen reader reads out the link, it’ll say “change name”. This makes the component more accessible, and helps it to satisfy a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) success criterion for links which says we must “provide link text that identifies the purpose of the link without needing additional context”.

By building our components with inclusion in mind, we can make it easier to make products accessible, before anyone’s even had to think about it. And that’s a great starting point. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to think about it – we definitely do. And a design system can help with that too.

2. Explain it

Having worked as the GOV.UK Design System’s content designer for the best part of 3 years, I’m somewhat biased about this, but I think that the most valuable aspect of a design system is its documentation.

(Here’s a shameless plug for my patterns Day talk on design system documentation earlier this year, if you want to know more about that.)

When it comes to accessibility, written documentation lets us guide good practice in a way that code and examples alone can’t.

By carefully documenting implementation rules for each component, we have an opportunity to distribute accessible design principles throughout a design system. This means design system users encounter them not just once, but repeatedly and frequently, in various contexts, which helps to build awareness over time.

For instance, WCAG 2.1 warns against using colour as “the only visual means of conveying information, calling an action, prompting a response or distinguishing a visual element”. This is a general principle to follow, but design system documentation lets us explain how this relates to specific components.

Take the GOV.UK Design System’s warning buttons. These are used for actions with serious, often destructive consequences that can’t easily be undone – like permanently deleting an account.

The example doesn’t tell you this, but the guidance explains that you shouldn’t rely on the red colour of warning buttons to communicate that the button performs a serious action, since not all users will be able to see the colour or understand what it signifies.

Instead, it says, “make sure the context and button text makes clear what will happen if the user selects it”. In this way, the colour is used as an enhancement for people who can interpret it, but it’s not necessary in order to understand it.

Making the code in our examples and component packages as accessible as possible by default is really important, but written documentation like this lets us be much more explicit about how to design accessible services.

3. Lead by example

In our design systems’ documentation, we’re telling people what good design looks like, so it’s really important that we practice what we preach.

Design systems are usually for members of staff, rather than members of the public. But if we want to build an inclusive workplace, we need to hold them to the same standards and ensure they’re accessible to everyone who might need to use them – today and in the future.

One of the ways we did this in my team, was by making sure the GOV.UK Design System supports users who need to customise the colours they use to browse the web. There are a range of different user needs for changing colours on the web. People who are sensitive to light, for instance, might find a white background too bright. And some users with dyslexia find certain colours easier to read than others.

My colleague, Nick Colley, wrote about the work we did to ensure GOV.UK Design System’s components will work when users change colours on GOV.UK. To ensure we weren’t introducing barriers to our colleagues, we also made it possible to customise colours in the GOV.UK Design System website itself.

Building this flexibility into our design system helps to support our colleagues who need it, but it also shows others that we’re committed to inclusion and removing barriers.

4. Teach it

The examples I’ve drawn on here have mostly focused on design system documentation and tooling, but design systems are much bigger than that. In the fortuitously-timed “There is No Design System”, Jina reminds us that tooling is just one of the ways we systematise design:

…it’s a lot of people-focused work: Reviewing. Advising. Organizing. Coordinating. Triaging. Educating. Supporting.”

To make a design system successful, we can’t just build a set of components and hope they work. We have to actively help people find it, use it and contribute to it. That means we have to go out and talk about it. We have to support people in learning to use it and help new teams adopt it. These engagement activities and collaborative processes that sit around it can help to promote awareness of the why, not just the what.

At GDS, we ran workshops on accessibility in the design system, getting people to browse various web pages using visual impairment simulation glasses to understand how visually impaired users might experience our content. By working closely with our systems’ users and contributors like this, we have an opportunity to bring them along on the journey of making something accessible.

We can help them to test out their code and content and understand how they’ll work on different platforms, and how they might need to be adjusted to make sure they’re accessible. We can teach them what accessibility means in practice.

These kinds of activities are invaluable in helping to promote accessible design thinking. And these kinds of lessons – when taught well – are disseminated as colleagues share knowledge with their teams, departments and the wider industry.

What design systems can’t do

Our industry’s excitement about design systems shows no signs of abating, and I’m excited about the opportunities it affords us to make accessible design the default, not an edge case. But I want to finish on a word about their limitations.

While a design system can help to promote awareness of the need to be accessible, and how to design products and services that are, a design system can’t make an organisation fundamentally care about accessibility.

Even with the help of a thoughtfully created design system, it’s still possible to make really inaccessible products if you’re not actively working to remove barriers. I feel lucky to have worked somewhere that prioritises accessibility. Thanks to the work of some really brilliant people, it’s just part of the fabric at GDS. (For more on that work and those brilliant people, I can’t think of a better place to start than my colleague Ollie Byford’s talk on inclusive forms.)

I’m far from being an accessibility expert, but I can write about this because I’ve worked in an organisation where it’s always a central consideration. This shouldn’t be something to feel lucky about. It should be the default, but sadly we’re not there yet. Not even close.

Earlier this year, Domino’s pizza was successfully sued by a blind customer after he was unable to order food on their website or mobile app, despite using screen-reading software. And in a recent study carried out by disability equality charity, Scope, 50% of respondents said that they had given up on buying a product because the website, app or in-store machine had accessibility issues.

Legally, reputationally and most importantly, morally, we all have a duty to do better. To make sure our products and services are accessible to everyone. We can use design systems to help us on that journey, but they’re just one part of our toolkit.

In the end, it’s about committing to the cause – doing the work to make things accessible. Because accessible design is good design.

About the author

Amy is a content specialist and design systems advocate who’s spent the last 3 years working as a Senior Content Designer at the Government Digital Service.

In that time, she’s led the content strategy for the GOV.UK Design System, including a straightforward and inclusive approach to documentation.

In January, Amy will continue her work in this space, in her new role as Product Manager for Babylon Health’s design system, DNA.

More articles by Amy

Online Resource

Online Resource

Barker Library - UG485.G46 2018

Father-son duo said the administration could have stopped the Muzaffarnagar riots.

The bombs targeted Narendra Modi's rally in Patna in one of its highest-profile battlegrounds.

Justice Ganguly is serving as chairman of the West Bengal Human Rights Commission.

New York : Springer, c2007

Berlin ; New York : Springer, c2005

Berlin ; New York : Springer, [2006]

Berlin ; New York : Springer, [2006]

Berlin ; New York : Springer, [2005]

Berlin ; New York : Springer, [2005]

Paulin, Sally, author

Harvey, Hal, author

Gupta, A. (Ashok)

Boom, Rob

Gupta, A. (Ashok), author

The panelists talk about design patterns in JavaScript with Addy Osmani

Sponsors:

• Netlify
• Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
• Clubhouse

Panel:

Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: Brady Gaster

In this episode, Chuck talks with Brady Gaster about SignalR that is offered through Microsoft. Brady Gaster is a computer software engineer at Microsoft and past employers include Logical Advantage, and Market America, Inc. Check out today’s episode where the two dive deep into SignalR topics.

Links:

• Vue
• jQuery
• Angular
• C#
• Chuck’s Twitter
• SignalR
• SignalR’s Twitter
• GitHub SignalR
• Socket.io
• Node-SASS
• ASP.NET SignalR Hubs API Guide – JavaScript Client
• SignalR.net
• Real Talk JavaScript
• Parcel
• Brady Gaster’s Twitter
• Brady Gaster’s GitHub
• Brady Gaster’s LinkedIn

Picks:

Brady

• Team on General Session
• Korg
• SeaHawks
• Brady’s kids
• Logictech spot light
• AirPods

Charles

• Express VPN
• Hyper Drive
• J5 ports and SD card readers
• Podwrench

Sponsors

• Triplebyte $1000 signing bonus
• Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
• CacheFly

Panel

• Aaron Frost
• AJ O’Neal
• Joe Eames
• Aimee Knight
• Chris Ferdinandi

Joined by special guest: James Shore

Episode Summary

Special guest James Shore returns for another episode of JavaScript Jabber. Today the panel discusses the idea of evolutionary design. Evolutionary design comes from Agile development. It is based on the principles of continuous integration and delivery and test driven development. In short, evolutionary design is designing your code as you go rather than in advance.

The panelists discuss the difficulties of evolutionary design and how to keep the code manageable.  James Shore introduces the three types of design that make up evolutionary design, namely simple design, incremental design, and continuous design. They talk about the differences between evolutionary design and intelligent design and the correlations between evolutionary design increasing in popularity and the usage of Cloud services. They talk about environments that are and are not conducive to evolutionary design and the financial ramifications of utilizing evolutionary design.

The panelists talk about the difficulties of planning what is needed in code and how it could benefit from evolutionary design. James enumerates the steps for implementing evolutionary design, which are upfront design, reflective design, and refactoring . The team ends by discussing the value of frameworks and how they fit with evolutionary design.

Links

• Agile
• Angular
• API
• CRC cards (class responsibility collaborators)
• Ember
• IntelliJ
• NPM
• React
• Redux
• Scrum
• Waterfall
• XJS

Picks

AJ O’Neal:

• Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse
• Pre-gap tracks album list
• QuickChip remover alloy

Aimee Knight:

• Puns.dev
• Bouldering

James Shore:

• Spiderman: Into the Spider Verse
• Pandemic Legacy

Aaron Frost:

• Easter Candy, especially
  • Nerd Jelly beans
  • Cadbury Mini Eggs
• Fun D&D moments

Joe Eames:

Chronicles of Crime board game

Sponsors

• Datadog

• Sentry use code “devchat” for 2 months free

Panel

• Aimee Knight

• Chris Ferdinandi

• Joe Eames

• AJ O’Neal

• Charles Max Wood

With Special Guests: Josh Thomas and Mike Hartington

Episode Summary

Today’s guests Josh Thomas and Mike Hartington are developers for Ionic, with Josh working on the open source part of the framework on Ionic. They talk about their new compiler for web components called Stencil. Stencil was originally created out of work they did for Ionic 4 (now available for Vue, React, and Angular) and making Ionic 4 able to compliment all the different frameworks. They talk about their decision to build their own compiler and why they decided to open source it. Now, a lot of companies are looking into using Stencil to build design systems

The panel discusses when design systems should be implemented. Since Ionic is a component library that people can pull from and use themselves, Jeff and Mike talk about how they are using Stencil since they’re not creating a design system.

The panel discusses some of the drawbacks of web components. They discuss whether or not Cordova changes the game at all. One of the big advantages of using Stencil is the code that is delivered to a browser is generated in such a way that a lot of things are handled for you, unlike in other systems.The panelists talk about their thoughts on web components and the benefits of using a component versus creating a widget the old fashioned way. One such benefit of web components is that you can change the internals of how it works without affecting the API. Josh and Mike talk about some of the abilities of Stencil and compare it to other things like Tachyons. There is a short discussion of the line between frameworks and components and the dangers of pre optimization. If you would like to learn more about Stencil, go to stenciljs.com and follow Josh and Mike @Jtoms1 and @mhartington.

Click here to cast your vote NOW for JavaScript Jabber - Best Dev Podcast Award

Links

• Building Design Systems book

• Stencil

• Cordova

• Shadow DOM

• Tachyons 

• Ionic 4

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Aimee Knight:

• What Does Debugging a Program Look Like?

AJ O’Neal:

• Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

• Neon Genesis Evangelion soundtrack

• Prettier

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Kindle Paperwhite

• Company of One

Charles Max Wood:

• Ladders with feet

• Lighthouse

• Acorns

Joe Eames:

• Moment.js

• How To Increase Your Page Size by 1500% article

• Day.js

Josh Thomas:

• Toy Story 4

Mike Hartington:

• Building Design Systems

• Youmightnotneed.com

Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent is a self taught web developer from west France. He has worked for BBC, The Guardian, and The Financial Times in the UK. He has also worked in the US for SalesForce and currently works for Shopify on their Polaris design system. Shopify has multiple design systems, and Polaris is open source. Today the panel is talking about design systems and developer tooling around design systems. 

To begin, Kaelig explains what a design system is. A design system is all of the cultural practices around design and shipping a product. It includes things like the words, colors, spacing grid system, and typography, plus guidance on how to achieve that in code. The panelists discuss what has made design systems so popular. Design systems have been around for a while, but became popular due to the shift to components, which has been accelerated by the popularity of React. The term design system is also misused by a lot of people, for it is much more than having a Sketch file. 

Next, they talk about whether design systems fall under the jurisdiction of a frontend developer or web designers. Kaelig has found that a successful design system involves a little bit of everyone and shouldn’t be isolated to one team. They talk about what the developer workflow looks like in a design system. It begins with thinking of a few common rules, a language, and putting it into code. As you scale, design systems can become quite large and it’s impossible for one person to know everything. You either give into the chaos, or you start a devops practice where people start to think about how we build, release, and the path from designer’s brain to production.

The panelists then talk about how to introduce a design system into a company where there are cultural conflicts. Kaelig shares his experience working with SalesForce and introducing a design system there. They discuss what aspects of a design system that would make people want to use it over what the team is currently doing. Usually teams are thankful for the design system. It’s important to build a system that’s complete, flexible, and extensible so that you can adapt it to your team. A good design system incorporates ‘subatomic’ parts like the grid system, color palette, and typography, referred to as design tokens. Design systems enable people to take just the bits of the design system that are interesting to them and build the components that are missing more easily. 

The conversation turns to the installation and upgrade process of a design system. Upgrading is left up to the customer to do on their own time in most cases, unless it’s one of the big customers. They talk about the role of components in upgrading a design system. Kaelig talks about the possibility of Shopify transitioning to web components. Kaelig shares some of his favorite tools for making a design system and how to get started making one. A lot of design teams start by taking a ton of screen shots and looking at all the inconsistencies.Giving them that visibility is a good thing because it helps get everyone get on the same page. The panelists talk about the role of upper management in developing components and how to prioritize feature development. Kaelig talks about what drives the decision to take a feature out. The two main reasons a feature would be removed is because the company wants to change the way things are done and there’s a different need that has arisen. The show concludes by discussing the possibility of a design system getting bloated over time. Kaelig says that Design systems takes some of the burden off your team, help prevent things from getting bloated, allow you to ship less code.

Panelists

• Chris Ferdinandi

• Aimee Knight

• Steve Emmerich

With special guest: Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent

Sponsors

• Sustain Our Software

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry’s small plan

• Adventures in Blockchain

Links

• Shopify Polaris

• Bootstrap

• React

• Sketch.ui

• Figma.ui 

• CSS

• StoryBook

• ESLint

• Jest

• Ensign

• Webpacker

Follow DevChatTV on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Steve Emmerich:

• CedarWorks play beds 

• Azure’s container instances

Aimee Knight:

• Awesome Actions for Github

Chris Ferdinandi:

• Free Meek docuseries

• Simplicity: Part 2 by Bastian Allgeier

Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent:

• Dependabot

• Ink by Vadim Demedez

• Follow Kaelig on Twitter @kaelig

Rieth, Michael

Ganguli, Prabuddha

Designing nanoparticle systems for catalysis (2018 : London).