Front-end Style Guides by Anna Debenham

Global and Component Style Settings with CSS Variables — Sara Soueidan

Sara shares how she programmes with custom properties in CSS. It sounds like her sensible approach aligns quite nicely with Andy’s CUBE CSS methodology.

Oh, and she’s using Fractal to organise her components:

I’ve been using Fractal for a couple of years now. I chose it over other pattern library tools because it fit my needs perfectly — I wanted a tool that was unopinionated and flexible enough to allow me to set up and structure my project the way I wanted to. Fractal fit the description perfectly because it is agnostic as to the way I develop or the tools I use.

Herman: Automated Pattern Libraries | OddBird

A lightweight style guide generator. This one uses SassDoc to parse out the documentation for colours, type, etc.

Design Systems Handbook - DesignBetter.Co

A weirdly over-engineered online book with bizarre scrolljacking (I would advise disabling JavaScript but then all the links stop working so you won’t be able to go past the table of contents) but it’s free and the content—by Marco Suarez, Jina Anne, Katie Sylor-Miller, Diana Mounter, and Roy Stanfield— looks good:

A design system unites product teams around a common visual language. It reduces design debt, accelerates the design process, and builds bridges between teams working in concert to bring products to life. Learn how you can create your design system and help your team improve product quality while reducing design debt.

Patterns Day 2017: Paul Lloyd on Vimeo

Paul pulls no punches in this rousing talk from Patterns Day.

The transcript is on his site.

Fantasies of the Future / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul has published the slides and transcript of his knock-out talk at Patterns Day. This a must-read: superb stuff!

Design systems are an attempt to add a layer of logic and reasoning over a series decisions made by complex, irrational, emotional human beings. As such, they are subject to individual perspectives, biases, and aspirations.

How does the culture in which they are made effect the resulting design?