If you’re planning on giving Fractal a test drive, jump into this Slack channel. Mark and others will be able to help you out with any questions that aren’t covered in the docs.
A great in-depth report from Alice on creating, running, and most importantly, selling an in-house design system. This makes a great companion piece to her Patterns Day talk.
Where internal teams seem to go wrong is not appreciating that the thing they’re building is still a product and so it needs to compete with other products on the market.
Thanks to jQuery, you probably don’t need jQuery. Just look at all these methods that started life in jQuery, that are now part of the standardised DOM API:
remove()prepend()before()replaceWith()closest()This is a superb way to deprecate a little JavaScript library. Now that you can just use HTML instead, the website for Pikaday has been turned into a guide to choosing the right design pattern for your needs. Bravo!
Pikaday is no longer a JavaScript date picker. Pikaday is now a friendly guide for front-end developers. I want to push developers away from the classic date picker entirely. Especially fat JavaScript libraries.
Call me Cassandra:
The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing similar concerns. In the words of Jeremy Keith:
[…] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.
So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality.
This grim assessment is well worth a read. It rings very true.
What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the “output” is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce “free” iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!
We noticed a trend: students who pick a UI framework like Bootstrap or Material UI get off the ground quickly and make rapid progress in the first few days. But as time goes on, they get bogged down. The daylight grows between what they need, and what the component library provides. And they wind up spending so much time trying to bend the components into the right shape.
I remember one student spent a whole afternoon trying to modify the masthead from a CSS framework to support their navigation. In the end, they decided to scrap the third-party component, and they built an alternative themselves in 10 minutes.
This tracks with my experience. These kinds of frameworks don’t save time; they defer it.
The one situation where that works well, as Josh also points out, is prototyping.
If the goal is to quickly get something up and running, and you don’t need the UI to be 100% professional, I do think it can be a bit of a time-saver to quickly drop in a bunch of third-party components.
My Clearleft colleagues are an inspiration.
You might want to use `display: contents` …maybe.
Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
Abstracting common interaction patterns as a starting point for accessible components.
Gotta keep ‘em separated.