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Something is broken with the web when every company across every industry feels the need to produce its own design system.

asadlionpk 7y ago
It's much much better than everyone adapting material design (ugh) or the default bootstrap theme.
RickS 7y ago
Are there changes to the web that you think would lift that burden, or make design systems less necessary? Two major drivers come to mind in terms of DS adoption: 1) Giving teams a common toolkit of resources so that they can design consistent experiences without having to independently implement and maintain the same components. 2) It's really trendy. It's the designer equivalent of moving to serverless, or nosql years ago, etc etc. Small teams do it because it's cool and fun despite not necessarily feeling the enterprise-scale pains that originated some of the practices. (I would not put flexport in that category. They've got an extremely data-intensive software, and a good component lib helps a lot there)
- akrymski 7y ago
  Sure, the HTML standard needs to go - it was designed for hyperlinked documents, not software. Components should be provided by browser/OS vendors with a standard look and feel, the same way desktop software has been written for decades. React Native is a glimpse of what HTML of the future will look like. Flexport is a logistics company. They aren’t in the business of selling software. What we’re doing right now is like the first GUI desktop apps - lacking consistency because there was no solid platform every designer reinvented the wheel.
  - akrymski 7y ago
    Thank god the browser provides the text input component otherwise every designer would have their own take on that too.
mikeryan 7y ago
Rather this then everyone just using a skinned version of bootstrap. But honestly this is just design management starting to make a real improvement to how design works across teams and applications. There seems to be a lot of push back here towards these systems and I'm not sure why. They just capture a ton of design information that already has to exist into a single place and tooling like React pairs great to break re-usable UI elements into common and shared components. Design Systems are A Good Thing that's improving what has been a pretty broken system.
baddox 7y ago
What seems broken about that? Do you think it's broken for each company to have a unique design for its website? Or do you think the "design systems" are the wrong way to architect the design of a website? Or something else?
- akrymski 7y ago
  Imagine if every Mac OS app had its own design system, styling and component implementation. That would be a nightmare for users. Yet this is exactly how web apps operate today. “Websites” is this general term that is hard to define these days. Sure a landing page for a restaurant should have its own design, just as business cards do. But an application like Gmail? Probably not the same thing.

asadlionpk 7y ago

It's much much better than everyone adapting material design (ugh) or the default bootstrap theme.

RickS 7y ago

Are there changes to the web that you think would lift that burden, or make design systems less necessary? Two major drivers come to mind in terms of DS adoption: 1) Giving teams a common toolkit of resources so that they can design consistent experiences without having to independently implement and maintain the same components. 2) It's really trendy. It's the designer equivalent of moving to serverless, or nosql years ago, etc etc. Small teams do it because it's cool and fun despite not necessarily feeling the enterprise-scale pains that originated some of the practices. (I would not put flexport in that category. They've got an extremely data-intensive software, and a good component lib helps a lot there)

akrymski 7y ago
Sure, the HTML standard needs to go - it was designed for hyperlinked documents, not software. Components should be provided by browser/OS vendors with a standard look and feel, the same way desktop software has been written for decades. React Native is a glimpse of what HTML of the future will look like. Flexport is a logistics company. They aren’t in the business of selling software. What we’re doing right now is like the first GUI desktop apps - lacking consistency because there was no solid platform every designer reinvented the wheel.
- akrymski 7y ago
  Thank god the browser provides the text input component otherwise every designer would have their own take on that too.

mikeryan 7y ago

Rather this then everyone just using a skinned version of bootstrap. But honestly this is just design management starting to make a real improvement to how design works across teams and applications. There seems to be a lot of push back here towards these systems and I'm not sure why. They just capture a ton of design information that already has to exist into a single place and tooling like React pairs great to break re-usable UI elements into common and shared components. Design Systems are A Good Thing that's improving what has been a pretty broken system.

baddox 7y ago

What seems broken about that? Do you think it's broken for each company to have a unique design for its website? Or do you think the "design systems" are the wrong way to architect the design of a website? Or something else?

akrymski 7y ago
Imagine if every Mac OS app had its own design system, styling and component implementation. That would be a nightmare for users. Yet this is exactly how web apps operate today. “Websites” is this general term that is hard to define these days. Sure a landing page for a restaurant should have its own design, just as business cards do. But an application like Gmail? Probably not the same thing.