Design Systems (Smashing eBooks)

The optimal number of design principles — if you want them to be in use — is between three and five.

Ask them to find a practical example in your product’s interface and include it alongside each principle.

Are you writing for a corporate identity brochure? For the company website? A careers website? Potential partners and customers? Try writing your principles for yourself and for your colleagues, first and foremost: designers, developers, content producers, marketing professionals, domain experts — people directly involved in the creation of the pro

The team at Spotify came up with the acronym TUNE (tone, usable, necessary, emotive) to make their design principles more memorable. Asking if a design is “in TUNE” during critiques and QA sessions has become part of Spotify’s design process.

There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation; no one got confused or tried to look up the principles in a brand manual. How could they remember them so well? Their principles were simple, relatable, useful — and there weren’t many of them.

For example, instead of designing a course list page, I’d think of the “Discovery” area as a whole. What are the behaviors we need to encourage at this stage of the user journey? What are the patterns that can support those behaviors?

Ideally, everyone involved in the creation of the product should know what this element is: its name and purpose, why it’s been designed that way, and how and when it should be used.

A design system contains many other kinds of patterns: user flows (such as completion of forms with errors and

If you need to get a group of people to follow a creative direction consistently, reliably and coherently, patterns need to be articulated and shared.

You print out the screens of your interface on paper, or collect them in Keynote or PowerPoint. You then separate out various components either by cutting them out or pasting them in Keynote.