In this article I will talk about the known and not so well known benefits of implementing a design system. And before you get the wrong idea: no, you can’t fire all designers. A design system is an ever-evolving, living system. It needs to grow and adapt and for this you need designers and developers.
A design system can have a positive impact on business goals, workflow & happiness and on shaping the brand experience for the customers and the employees. The benefits can be categorised into these four groups: scalability, speed & quality, documentation and brand & culture.
Knowing…
You may know what design tokens are and what benefits they can bring. But you may wonder how exactly to start using them and how you can integrate them into your workflow. I this article you will learn just that:
Design tokens are an integral part of any design system. They bridge the gap between core values (brand colors, typography, etc.) and components. …
Design tokens ease building products by improving the communication around design. They help scale your product by separating design decisions from specific platforms & technologies.
They improve communication with build-in documentation & promoting design decisions out of design files.
Design tokens are a very “hot” topic at the moment. You may think it’s only a fancy name for a design related variable. While you may find them as variables in your files, this is only part of the truth. Let’s have a look at some common definitions to make sense of this confusion.
According to the w3c working group in…
Starting to work as a designer, I couldn’t believe my luck. People would pay me to explore, experiment and try things. All I had to do is keep at it until all the pieces fit together perfectly.
What I didn’t realise back then is, that this is a technique called iterating.
Iterating is a phenomenal technique. It takes next to nothing to learn and benefits from all other experience and knowledge that you gain. Everybody knows it — few use it.
You will see the impact right away. It doesn’t matter if you are starting out in the field or…
According to gestalt psychology, we need to organise what we see to make sense of the world. Without using patterns to order out vision, we would overwhelm our brain. The gestalt psychologists formalised those patterns as the gestalt principles.
The gestalt principles (of grouping) are part of the most important design theories. Organising information means understanding. A designer’s task is to make content as easy to understand as possible. Proximity is one of the most common principles. In the following I will provide some examples to show the importance of this principle.
The principle of proximity states that we perceive…
In nowadays it is impossible to write frontend code without a build tool. We work with typescript and sass, bundle and optimise our code. Gulp was my choice for the last 3 years. But lately I have been growing frustrated with the overhead it brings. Doing what you want can be very hard, especially if what you need does not exist on a ready made recipe. And if you try to write your own plugins streams and buffers can scare you off.
For my open source javascript packages I always used node modules to build the code. This made me…
In this article I explore the three most important aspects fo making your design files easy and enjoyable to work with: naming, versioning and organisation.
Although I focus on sketch files, most of the ideas are applicable for any type of design file. However some ideas might not work as well if your tool does not support pages.
Finding a good name for your file is crucial to communicate it’s content. However, if you stick to a simple naming convention you should have no trouble with this.
What worked well for me is combining the project name and the platform…
Recently gestalt theory (also gestaltism) has gained immense popularity, especially for designers. In fact it seems to be in trend. However, gestalt principles are also very helpful and designers should know about them.
Most authors discuss gestalt principles in an abstract form. Others focus on print design. There are few articles about gestaltism in digital products. While different at first, digital and print products adhere to the same layout rules. The details might be different from print publications, but the ideas remain relevant.
In this article series I want to highlight the impact of gestaltism on digital design. Furthermore, I…
In nowadays it is impossible to write frontend code without a build tool. We work with typescript and sass, bundle and optimise our code. Gulp was my choice for the last 3 years. But lately I have been growing frustrated with the overhead it brings. Doing what you want can be very hard, especially if what you need does not exist on a ready made recipe. And if you try to write your own plugins streams and buffers can scare you off.
For my open source javascript packages I always used node modules to build the code. This made me…
Framer X is the latest software by the team at Framer. They are trying to solve “digital product design from start to finish”. They introduced some very novel and unique features. So let’s see if Framer X is right for you.
I love what the team has done with Framer X and enjoyed working with it quite a bit.
Generally Framer X is pretty snappy with not to many bugs. The interface works and is easy to understand. And with the interactive onboarding, learning how to use it is a matter of minutes.
Building certain interactions in just a couple…
Product designer with a love for complex problems & data. Everything I post on Medium is a copy — the originals are on my own website: https://www.vea.re