What Are Design Systems?
An interview with Intergalactico Design Systems lead Rami Ertimo
Intergalactico, the recently launched Nordcloud Design Studio, had a high profile at the Design Systems Conference 2018, in Helsinki, last week. The event was sold out and we were proud to see Intergalactico Design Systems lead Rami Ertimo on stage with Mikko Häkkinen from Elisa, the biggest telecoms operator in Finland. Together, they discussed the inception and creation of Elisa Design Systems, as well as one of its most publicly visible results: the Elisa Stylebook.
Design Systems are an important part of the Intergalactico offering as well. In this post, we interview Rami about what Design Systems are and how can you tell if you need them.
What are Design systems?
Rami, can you simply describe what heck Design Systems are?
Design Systems are the future of systematic design. They are a way to ensure that design work can scale inside organizations and produce systematic outcomes: coherent, branded user interfaces with a consistent look and feel.
The term Design System is a fairly new one, and the lingua franca around it is still forming. I think this is also part of the beauty of it. With events like the DSConference we are defining what it means, together.
Another great thing is that the term accommodates many design activities and tools under the umbrella of Design Systems. The challenge is to develop a system that meets your organization’s needs and creates an atmosphere that encourages naturally evolving systems. But to get a basic grasp of what we are talking about, I’ll try to define the core parts that should be included in a successful design system.
With just a quick glance, you should be able to recognize Design Systems from the various documents they create. Things like Pattern libraries, UI kits, content strategies, and design principles are all instruments which may be contained and maintained inside a Design System.
These instruments help solve everyday design challenges quickly and efficiently. Reusing known UI components and following well-documented design conventions is the key. This relieves designers from the burden of reinvention and allows them to save their effort to create new designs or to improve existing ones.
Using Design Systems, we can describe a new interface in a high level language defined by the design system, without needing any platform specific technical details, and everyone in design and business will instantly understand what it means. And engineering can also implement it much faster, with minimal instruction.
However, Design Systems are more than a tool. They are an internal product and a practice for managing the design of other products inside a company. As Nathan Curtis says, “design systems are a product serving other products”. To facilitate communication, the individual instruments, such as a style guide, are crucial but it is the people and processes for maintaining a Design System which make it a success!
Company formerly known as SC5 had a style guide product. Is that still relevant?
Yes, there are many occasions where the SC5 style guide can still be used effectively. However, as a company, we are not actively developing it at this time.
I think the SC5 style guide is still a valid solution if you’re looking for a pattern library to document UI Patterns when you’re using Sass, LESS, PostCSS or vanilla CSS in your components. This may be practical if you don’t have common front-end stacks in your company.
Overall, I think style guides are being replaced by pattern libraries which go beyond styling. They include documentation, examples, and even functional components in contexts.
What does the future of Design Systems look like?
I believe that Design Systems are the next Scrum or Kanban for design. They are the new way of working that everybody will eventually adopt. Like agile, Design Systems will find their own special implementation within each company and community. However, there will also be common ground, with general, global practises that everyone finds beneficial and useful.
Design Systems will definitely develop further. I expect the biggest thing to be the unification of tools for designers and developers to share. From the platform perspective this means a unification of pattern libraries that serve different platforms in unified way. Advances will also be made in how patterns can be utilised across an organisation. For instance, content authors will be able to utilise ready-made templates of patterns with content coming from another system. Designers will be able to perform A/B testing on a new idea built on variations of existing patterns. Machine learning techniques will be used to automatically identify the closest patterns for a product when a pattern library is being with an existing product. As Design Systems have no fixed boundaries, I believe that several new design- related ideas which reach across organisations will find their way into Design Systems in the near future.
In the next Design Systems story, we will be answering questions about who needs Design Systems, and we’ll describe their vast benefits and explain why their ROI is amazing!
Get a great head start in using Design Systems and sign up for the Intergalactico hands-on workshops! Read more here:
At Intergalactico we are naturally willing to offer you our expertise and assist your organization on its way to setting up design operations which utilize Design Systems. Just contact us and let’s discuss how we can best help your organization to take advantage of Design Systems.
