Design systems
Rethinking fundamentals for the future?
I was very much focused on design systems from 2018 onwards. I worked in a small agency start-up and the founder needed a lot of components that can be reused from project to project. In a sense, I liked that idea. A centralized library of unique components and as time goes this library becomes a big design system.
Even after I left that agency, this idea grew on me. I mean I wanted to build an open-sourced design system, but it became a thing in the social feeds before I could even begin my idea. I lost the interest.
Is it really needed for a project?
Yes and no.
No project needs a big design system at its inception. That’s just a waste of time and not a priority-focused journey.
The system needs to be built along with the product. Not before the product. Why limit ourselves before even begin?
I tried several times to start working on my system since 2021, but something keeps pulling me back every time I open Figma/Figjam/Brainstorming tools. My mind is like, “No, you don't need it right now, this is not your priority”.
However, when I joined my previous start-up, I saw the importance and need for a foundation-level design system. I mean most of the date pickers work in different styles in different places, headers, colors used, button sizes and states, hierarchy, spacing, etc.
I mean all we needed at that time is a color and typography system with basic components like buttons, dropdowns, tooltips, date and time pickers, checkboxes, radio, and switch.
Why? We started to build the knowledge base of the product, to reduce the confusion and accommodate the service support easily we needed to make a consistency. Most of the end users were only exposed to Facebook-level designs. They were all like, how to do this, how to do that, how do I cancel, etc.
To me, a design system is not just about components. It’s about how the entire product works. Including every bit of it, like wikis, emails, chat snippets, support reply style, etc.
It’s not easy to implement, and it’s a slow process. But better late than never.
Do you know the real reason why the developed product and designed product are different? Because, we need to work with developers one at a time, don’t just give them everything at once. That is information overload.
I saw a lot of Instagram influencers sharing different levels of design systems with the community, a community that has a lot of junior designers who are still not exposed to how the development team sees the handoff.
Yes, I know it is not their responsibility, but I don't feel this is a good way of influencing. To them, it’s just a content for the day. So one influencer starts it, and everyone else starts following it. Within two to twenty days your feed is full of “design system” posts that are labeled as“ save for later - more and more information.
The majority of influencers in the design community are acting like a plague. They're chasing trends, and selling products or services and most of them are not even good at what they are doing. Just imitating others.
I get that some might offended by statements like this, but that is not my intention. I just wanted something unique, something that I’d look forward type of knowledge in a bite-sized model. I know a few of those kind. I follow their work regularly.
I chose to learn more about it from Google Material Design - the fundamentals.
These so-called design influencers saturated the market with a lot of unwanted information. I mean my complaint is that they were all too focused on the tool than the idea. When the supply hyped up, the demand and the real use/idea went somewhere and now it is overwhelming. Not just me, I saw a lot of people speaking up about this.