Another instance of Fractal in the wild, this time for the Federalist design system.
Why Fractal?
- It’s open source.
- It’s easy to use.
- It generates standalone HTML previews of each component.
- It uses or supports many of the technologies we use already.
- Fractal offers a customizable theme engine.
You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.
While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.
Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.
Whenever I confront a design system problem, I ask myself this one question that guides the way: “What would HTML do?”
HTML is the ultimate composable language. With just a few elements shuffled together you can create wildly different interfaces. And that’s really where all the power from HTML comes up: everything has one job, does it really well (ideally), which makes the possible options almost infinite.
Design systems should hope for the same.
Okay, if you weren’t already excited for Patterns Day, get a load of what Rich is going to be talking about!
You’ve got your ticket, right?
When you think of heraldry what comes to mind is probably knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, jousting, that sort of thing. Medieval stuff. But I prefer to think of it as one of the earliest design systems.
This totally checks out.
Every day, a new marketing email, Medium post, or VC who will leave Twitter when they’re cold in a body bag tells us that machine learning (ML, which they call AI because it sounds more expensive) is going to change the way we work. Doesn’t really matter what your job is. ML is going to read, write, code, and paint for us.
Naturally, the excitement around ML has found its way into the design systems community. There’s an apparent natural synergy between ML and design systems. Design systems practitioners are tantalized by the promise of even greater efficiency and scale. We wish a machine would write our docs for us.
We are all, every single one of us, huge fucking nerds.
My Clearleft colleagues are an inspiration.
There’s probably a Pace Layer analogy in here somewhere.
The joy of getting hands-on with HTML and CSS.
Is your design system really a system …or is it more like a collection of components?
Five more articles on modern responsive design to close out the course.