Tags: system

Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease - Snook.ca

I hereby dub this Snook’s Law:

Any working system can become invisible to the point where the system loses value because it’s working.

It is now exactly five weeks until Patterns Day—just another 35 sleeps!

Everthing is in place for a perfect day of deep dives into design systems. There’ll be eight snappy 30 minute talks—bam, bam, bam!

Here’s the schedule I’ve got planned for the day:

9:00	Registration.
9:45	Jeremy introduces the day.
10:00	Jina delivers the opening keynote.
10:30	Débora talks about the outcomes, lessons and challenges from using design tokens.
11:00	Break.
11:30	Yolijn talks about the relay method for design system governance.
12:00	Geri talks about her journey navigating accessibility in design systems.
12:30	Lunch.
14:00	Richard talks about responsive typography in design systems.
14:30	Samantha talks about getting buy-in for a design system.
15:00	Break.
15:30	Mary talks about transitioning from a single to a multi-brand design system.
16:00	Vitaly delivers the closing keynote.
16:30	Jeremy wraps up the day.
16:45	Have a drink and a geek pub quiz at the Hare And Hounds pub.

I assume you’ve got your ticket already, but if not use the discount code JOINJEREMY to get 10% off the ticket price.

See you there!

Patterns Day is exactly six weeks away—squee!

If you haven’t got your ticket yet, get one now. (And just between you and me, use the discount code JOINJEREMY to get a 10% discount.)

I’ve been talking to the speakers and getting very excited about what they’re going to be covering. It’s shaping up to be the perfect mix of practical case studies and big-picture thinking. You can expect talks on design system governance, accessibility, design tokens, typography, and more.

I’m hoping to have a schedule for the day ready by next week. It’s fun trying to craft the flow of the day. It’s like putting together a set list for a concert. Or maybe I’m just overthinking it and it really doesn’t matter because all the talks are going to be great anyway.

There are sponsors for Patterns Day now too. Thanks to Supernova and Etch you’re going to have bountiful supplies of coffee, tea and pastries throughout the day. Then, when the conference talks are done, we’ll head across the road to the Hare And Hounds for one of Luke Murphy’s famous geek pub quizes, with a bar tab generously provided by Zero Height.

Now, the venue for Patterns Day is beautiful but it doesn’t have enough space to provide everyone with lunch, so you’re going to have an hour and a half to explore some of Brighton’s trendy lunchtime spots. I’ve put together a list of lunch options for you, ordered by proximity to the Duke of York’s. These are all places I can personally vouch for.

Then, after the conference day, and after the pub quiz, there’s Vitaly’s workshop the next day. I will most definitely be there feeding on Vitaly’s knowledge. Get a ticket if you want to join me.

But wait! That’s not all! Even after the conference, and the pub quiz, and the workshop, the nerdy fun continues on the weekend. There’s going to be an Indie Web Camp here in Brighton on the Saturday and Sunday after Patterns Day.

If you’ve been to an Indie Web Camp before, you know how inspiring and fun it is. If you haven’t been to one yet, you should definitely come along. It’s free! If you’ve got your own website, or if you’re even just thinking about having your own website, it’s a great opportunity to meet with like-minded people.

So that’s going to be four days of non-stop good stuff here in Brighton. I’m looking forward to seeing you then!

Responsive typography and its role in design systems | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

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?

How NASA Learned to Love the Worm Logo - The New York Times

A delightful ode to a once-divisive design.

How Certain Algorithms to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed – The Markup

A terrific piece from Aaron Sankin that goes from Waldsterben to software development via firefighting and the RAND corporation.

Bureaucracies use measurements to optimize and rearrange the world around them. For those measurements to be effective, they have to be conducted in units as relevant as possible to the conditions on the ground.

Design Systems Database: Surf among top‑notch Design Systems

A collection of collections, this is a directory of design systems, with the handy option to browse by component type. The blueprints section is still a bit thin on the ground, but likes the most useful bit—an in-depth dissection of individual compenent types.

The line-up for Patterns Day is complete! You’ll be hearing from eight fantastic speakers on March 7th 2024 here in Brighton.

I really like the mix of speakers we’ve got…

Half of the speakers will be sharing what they’ve learned from design systems in their organisations: Débora from LEGO, Mary from the Financial Times, Yolijn from the Dutch government, and Samantha from University College London. That’s a good spread of deep dives.

The other half of the speakers can go broad across design systems in general: Vitaly on design patterns, Rich on typography, Geri on accessibility, and Jina on …well, absolutely everything to do with design systems!

I’m so happy that I could get the line-up to have this mix. If you have any interest in design systems at all—whether it’s as a designer, a developer, a product manager, or anything else—you won’t want to miss this. Early bird tickets are £225.

But wait! That’s not all. If you really want to dive deep into interface design patterns, then stick around. The day after Patterns Day, Vitaly is running a one-day workshop:

In this in-person workshop with Vitaly Friedman, UX consultant and creative lead behind Smashing Magazine, we’ll dive deep into dissecting how to solve complex design problems. Whether you’re working on a complex nested multi-level navigation or creating enterprise grade tables, this workshop will give you the tools you need to excel at your work.

Places are limited. There isn’t room for everyone who’s going to be at Patterns Day, so if you—and your team—want to learn design pattern kung-fu from the master, get your workshop ticket now! Workshop tickets are £445.

Ship Faster by Building Design Systems Slower | Big Medium

Josh mashes up design systems and pace layers, like Mark did a few years back. With this mindset, if your product interface are in sync, that’s not good—either your product is moving too slow or your design system is moving too fast.

The job of the design system team is not to innovate, but to curate. The system should provide answers only for settled solutions: the components and patterns that don’t require innovation because they’ve been solved and now standardized. Answers go into the design system when the questions are no longer interesting—proven out in product. The most exciting design systems are boring.

What the f••k is a Design System?

Answers on a postcard, please (and by postcard, I mean textarea).

Link colors and the rule of tincture

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.

htmx ~ Why htmx Does Not Have a Build Step

The best reason to write a library in plain JavaScript is that it lasts forever. This is arguably JavaScript’s single most underrated feature. While I’m sure there are some corner cases, JavaScript from 1999 that ran in Netscape Navigator will run unaltered, alongside modern code, in Google Chrome downloaded yesterday. That is true for very few programming environments.

And yet:

Of course, most people’s experience with JavaScript is that it ages like milk. Reopen a node repository after 3 months and you’ll find that your project is mired in a flurry of security warnings, backwards-incompatible library “upgrades,” and a frontend framework whose cultural peak was the exact moment you started the project and is now widely considered tech debt.

Against Scale

Claire L. Evans has written a beautiful piece on the difference between growth and scalability:

Life is nonhierarchical, and it shirks top-down control. But scalability relies on hierarchy, on the isolation of elements stripped of history and context. It is predicated on the assumption that nature is little more than a raw material to be processed and commodified until it is spent. This is, of course, unsustainable — at any scale.

Erik Wernquist - Short Film: “One Revolution Per Minute”

Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:

I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.

Mark your calendar: Thursday, March 7th, 2024. That’s when Patterns Day will return for its third edition.

Patterns Day is a one-day event focused on design systems. It’s for designers, developers, project managers, writers, and anyone else who’s working with design systems, pattern libraries, style guides, and components. Tickets are on sale now!

Once again, Patterns Day will be in the magnificent Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton, with its historic charm and dangerously comfortable seats.

The first Patterns Day was all the way back in 2017. Then we had the second Patterns Day in 2019. You can watch videos of the talks from both years.

We all know what happened after 2019. Nothing like a global pandemic to stop an event in its tracks.

Now, finally, Patterns Day is returning in 2024.

After all this time, is there still a need for an event focused on design systems?

In my opinion, the answer is “more than ever!”

When Clearleft first ran Patterns Day, we had been doing design systems work for a while, but other organisations were only at the start of their journey. Many of the attendees were from companies that were dabbling in design systems, or planned to put a design system together.

That situation has changed. Now most organisations either have at least some experience with design systems. Many companies have got design systems up and running.

But the challenges haven’t gone away. They’ve just changed. You might no longer need to convince anyone that a design system is a good idea, but you might well be struggling to convince people to use the design system you’ve got.

It can be lonely work. That’s why Patterns Day is so vital. It’s a chance to get together with other people going through the same struggles. You’ll have an opportunity to learn from their successes and failures. Most of all, you’ll have the reassurance that you are not alone.

I know that makes it sound more like therapy than a conference, but honestly, that’s where the true value lies.

We’ve already got some fantastic speakers lined up, but there are just as many still to come!

Can you tell that I’m very excited about this?

It would be lovely to see there. Tickets will cost £255, but you can secure your place now at the super early bird price of just £195. Dither ye not!

Can’t wait to see you in Brighton on March 7th—it’s going to be a day to remember!

Burn baby burnout by Amy Hupe, content designer.

Here’s the transcript of a great talk by Amy on the realities of working on design systems.

Why design systems fail by Karen Vanhouten

1. No shared (and contextual) sense of purpose
2. Overbuilding, or scaling too early
3. Inability to make decisions and move forward quickly
4. Lack of clear ownership and dedicated resources
5. Lack of cultural alignment

The common thread among these issues is that none are related to technical or tooling decisions —or even to the components themselves.

WPDS - Accessibility | Resources

I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.

Efficiency trades off against resiliency - Made of Bugs

Past some point, making a system more efficient will mean making it less resilient, and, conversely, building in robustness tends to make a system less efficient (at least in the short run).

This is true of software, networks, and organisations.

When we set metrics or goals for a system or a team or an organization that ask for efficiency, let us be aware that, absent countervailing pressures, we are probably also asking for the system to become more brittle and fragile, too.

The machines won’t save your design system — Hey Jovo Design

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.