Design Systems London 2019 - Laura González

15 November 2019

The Guardian has a ton of layouts for different content and stories.
They didn’t really have a Design System and have started looking at creating one.
They had two subscription services needing the same pages - a great opportunity to join forces.
They didn’t have the resources to create a Design System, so they created a guerrilla design system.
Design is applying a ton of unwritten rules with writing a ton of CSS
Design System = Design as a System?
When building the subscriptions page - they could ‘copy and paste the CSS from figma’ but it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t use tokens and can easily fall apart.
The web is less of a garden and more of a battle ground
We need to make CSS is resilient and scales.
Design System = future-proofing - by sharing the same base core we can help the future.
The gaming industry are similar in they too have Design Systems for their game maps and layout.
How do developer a unique page as part of a system
- find patterns
- turn them into components
- reuse, recycle, reiterate
Writing more CSS is easier than talking to people.
If you have a website, you have a poorly documented design system already.
Converting the components of a page into a Storybook component library some guardian developers called it an ‘anti design system’ but it solved the goals of the subscriptions service pages.