Design Systems are great! They helped our team prototype solutions so much faster, allowed for unified designs on all our served platforms and helped tracking changes more easily with dedicated component library and product sketch files.
However after maintaining and using our system day in day out we faced a series of problems, and annoyances:
Naming
When I first started working on the code of our app after designing the application for over one year, it struck me to see the naming was not at all related to the one we used in our sketch files.
Naming conventions on the design part had no effect on the ones defined by our developers and vice versa. This makes an effective theming impossible with no clear reference to each color and coordinating style changes so much harder.
Theming
This…
Part 1: Design as a team
One designer on your team, in outright conviction that the current 2677FD can not be the right choice of blue, changes the color slightly to a more saturated 2676FB, unaware he again forgot to turn off flux. The next day Lisa is infuriated. The color she loved so much now looks terrible on her display. Aziz is furious. He was working on illustrations for the product website, nitpicking the right colors based on the original blue. Oh noes, what a mess…
Heard or seen that before? Bear with me, you´re not alone: Even though we are just a small team…
Ludwig Frank
Design and Code @ moonfare.
