In this chapter, Brad Frost will tackle all that goes into selling, creating, and maintaining effective design systems. What begins as a giant slab of rock can turn into a finely polished sculpture, thanks to a ton of hard work, genuine collaboration, constant communication, and plenty of iteration. If you like what you read, we’ve got you covered! The print version of Smashing Book 5 (including the eBook) bundled with the Atomic Design eBook is available today for just $29 — down from $49. Get the bundle now. You ready? Let’s go.
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When building a pattern library, we tend to focus too much on the modules, providing a structural view of the system, rather than showing how it can be used effectively — thereby undermining its usefulness to most team members. Finding the right way to architect a lasting pattern library is difficult. This article highlights some practical techniques and strategies to establish a pattern library that will be actively and consistently used by the entire team.
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The benefits of UI design systems are now well known. They lead to more cohesive, consistent user experiences. They speed up your team’s workflow, allowing you to launch more stuff while saving huge amounts of time and money in the process. They establish a common vocabulary between disciplines, resulting in a more collaborative and constructive workflow.
They make browser, device, performance, and accessibility testing easier. And they serve as a solid foundation to build upon over time, helping your organization to more easily adapt to the ever-shifting web landscape. This article provides a detailed guide to building and maintaining atomic design systems with Pattern Lab 2.
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Creating a flexible UI system that is consistent and easy to customize, while also scalable and cost-efficient, depends not only on how it is built, but on how it is designed. A library of components has very little value if every new design is created independently, ignoring established standards and patterns. In this article, Adriana De La Cuadra explains the value of modularity in UI design and how it ties into the process of style guide-driven development, which improves the implementation of flexible and user-friendly applications, while helping designers and developers collaborate more productively.
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Creating a living style guide is a long but worthwhile process. Steven Lambert made a few mistakes along the way that prevented developers and designers from adopting it sooner or using it effectively. However, he pushed through and eventually made it to the end. This is the story of how Steven developed a living style guide, the mistakes made along the way, and why the current landscape of style guide generators did not suit his needs.
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In his article on Selling Design Systems, Dan Mall suggests to illustrate how fractured an organization is by printing out its different presences online and putting them on a large board as an example of all the wasted money and effort that goes into making sites from scratch, one-by-one, needlessly reinventing the wheel every time. What Vitaly Friedman learned from his experience is that trying to focus on the workflow or the process is never as helpful as focusing on tangible benefits that the client will get as a result.
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In this article, Ben Callahan will help you be more successful with your web projects by starting at the beginning; by working from day one to help set your client’s expectations about what’s going to happen, and by working throughout a project’s life cycle to do the same. By the end of this article, you’ll find yourself more inspired to invest in your own understanding of how the web works, and more willing to invest in your teammates’ understanding. Ben hopes you’ll feel excited to try a new approach, but he also that you’ll be empowered to tear these pages up if they don’t work for you. Only you, your team and your customer can figure out the best way to approach a project. The time is now — so, get to it!
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Small companies with newer brands suffer from not yet having established a culture and the difficulty of conveying their inner values in external communication Working so closely with a large enterprise such as Lufthansa can be overwhelming for any small startup. In this article, Josip Budzaki explains how the project with Lufthansa and their way of thinking really facilitated the process and enabled the team to follow their vision — that’s not something you encounter in many companies!
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Living style guides help front-end developers transform front-end codebases into well-described pattern libraries with the minimum of effort. But to make them really efficient, we need to choose the proper tools — so let’s have a closer look at what our community has to offer. In this article, Robert Haritonov has arranged the tools by function, highlighting only the most powerful ones worth knowing about. You can find more tools, plus videos, articles and other material about style guides at styleguide.io.
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In this article, Varya Stepanova & Juuso Backman will talk about style guides that are generated directly from the style definition sources — i.e. CSS and its modern variants. Style guides are useful in many aspects of development and maintenance, so it’s little wonder that developing them has become a highly popular practice. But even with the clear benefits, taking the necessary steps to start using them is easier said than done, as quite often the challenge is cultural, requiring changes in people’s mindsets. We encourage everyone to try it!
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