[HN Gopher] The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems
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       The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems
        
       Author : nkjoep
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2021-02-12 08:20 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (alistapart.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (alistapart.com)
        
       | k__ wrote:
       | I had the impression, design systems were things designers come
       | up with and then get used by many projects/companies.
       | 
       | Like Google's Material Design or Ant Design etc.
        
         | MAGZine wrote:
         | Nope, many companies have their own internal design systems for
         | keeping look/feel of marketing materials, UIs, etc all
         | consistent.
         | 
         | Even at PlanGrid, when we were 450 people, we had our own
         | design system.
        
       | tabtab wrote:
       | All-or-nothing abstractions can make for chaos and confusion.
       | Incremental abstractions seem a safer bet even if the longer-term
       | result is not as good as the One Big Tool approach. Automate or
       | simplify one aspect at a time. Look for the most common points of
       | repetition and difficulties and work on those first.
        
       | tomca32 wrote:
       | I really don't have a feeling design systems are a hard sell
       | unlike almost all other internal tools. It's the only internal
       | tool I have seen that is consistently present at the vast
       | majority of companies I have worked at.
       | 
       | I also don't think they are ever worth the investment.
        
       | underwater wrote:
       | Design Systems are great in theory, but in practice can devolve
       | into navel gazing and just be a time suck for design and product
       | organisations.
       | 
       | In the worst case you end up with designers over reaching and
       | designing UI and UX for all sorts of speculative use cases. And
       | then acting as gatekeepers for anything that falls outside of
       | that. If you want to use an element the system doesn't include
       | then you need to make a case that your design is valid for a
       | whole host of use cases you don't care about.
       | 
       | The best design systems I've seen are trailing the rest of the
       | design org, and document what is working rather than trying to
       | skate ahead.
        
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