Posts Tagged ‘design systems’

I had the extraordinary honor to appear on the Design Better podcast and talk with my friends Aarron Walter and Elijah Woolery. We talked about why we’re still passionate about design systems after 12 years, the human side of design […]

There’s some fantastic UI inspiration on Fancy Components. I can already here the grumblings around practicality, accessibility, React, etc, but let’s park all that for a bit and just enjoy some fun and creative UI design.

I’m messing with my MailChimp account and really love their Brand Kit feature. You have the ability to upload logos, define color palettes, typography, personality, button styles, and more. I especially like the experience around managing logos. They provide a […]

We’re cooking with gas on our Subatomic design tokens course and are gearing up for a really big milestone! We’re about to launch Chapter 4, which details the nuts and bolts of building out a token system in Figma and […]

OH HELL YEAH: designtokens.fyi by Donnie D’Amato is a mega-helpful glossary of design tokens terms.

Do you love having to name things? Of course you don’t! That’s why we’re so excited to announce that Chapter 3 of our Subatomic Design Tokens Course is now live! We have a FULL HOUR AND A HALF of video […]

David Darnes says You’re Not Creating Enough Prototypes, and I agree! David shares some great real-world examples of how he’s wielded design system components for rapid prototyping. We need more of this!

We’re thrilled to announce that Chapter 2 of our Subatomic Design Tokens Course is now live! This chapter provides 74-minutes of video diving deep into design token architecture and foundations. We cover a ton of ground, including: The three-tiered token system consists of three tiers: […]

I had the tremendous honor of being the first guest on Elyse Holladay‘s new podcast, On Theme: Design Systems In Depth! Brad Frost takes us back in time to the early days of design systems, and walks us through some […]

In addition to stuffing our faces with cookies, Ian and I were hard at work over the holidays creating our design tokens course. I’m freaking thrilled that we published 2 hours of preorder-exclusive video content, shared several dozen links, and included […]

BIG NEWS! We’re hard at work making an online course called Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens. Over the past decade, Ian Frost and I have created design token systems for dozens of organizations — including some of the […]

React v19 was just released with support for Web Components! React 19 adds full support for custom elements and passes all tests on Custom Elements Everywhere. In past versions, using Custom Elements in React has been difficult because React treated […]

I recently had the pleasure of doing a Q&A session with Molly Helmuth’s Design System Bootcamp cohort. The questions were great and varied, so I asked Molly if she’d be alright if I shared my answers with you all. Thankfully, […]

At Big Medium, we’re fans of Web Components, and over the last 6 years have been helping our clients build standards-based, interoperable, design systems with them. The ability to deliver a consistent, cohesive experience to a any web-based technology perfectly […]

When design system users run into issues designing and developing with the system, they often have a hard time distinguishing between a bug, a missing feature, an intentional design deviation, a new pattern they need to create, or something else. […]

Well this is just a really nice piece of flattery, and a nice breakdown of my design system masterclass I delivered at HATCH Conference in Berlin last year. I truly enjoy teaching masterclasses, running workshops, and working with teams to […]

When you don’t hear from teams using your design system, we’ve learned over the years that it’s typically not a sign of “everything is going great” but “something is probably wrong.” We teach our client teams to be very skeptical […]

That one weird trick? TALK. What do you do when someone doesn’t see what component they’re looking for in the design system? TALK. What do you do when someone has questions about what a component does, if it meets their […]

If you feel like you’re struggling to keep up with the pace of technological change, you’re certainly not alone. We feel this pressure at an individual level, but also at an organizational level. How do digital organizations establish solid, stable […]

text-decoration-offset is a good use case for em units. Most of the time we favor rems over ems, but in this case we want the text underline offset to proportionally scale with the `font-size` property. Here’s a quick demo: See […]

You Want border-color: transparent, Not border: none by Dave is a great reminder to not remove borders from components for accessibility reasons, especially to better support high contrast mode. border-color: transparent comes in handy for other use cases as well. […]

One of my favorite Josh lines that’s really stood the test of time and cuts through a lot of noise in a conversation: Don’t put crap in the design system. Josh Clark What is crap? Crap is rushed work, low-quality […]

There have been tons of design system roundup sites over the years, but The Component Gallery  by Iain Bean is particularly well designed and fun.

Here’s my pal and frequent collaborator TJ Pitre with The Value of Design Tokens in Modern Web Development. TJ’s post is a good overview of design tokens and the various aspects of working with them in a web development workflow.

I had a great chat with Chris Strahl on the Design Systems Podcast, and we covered a lot of ground! We sit down with Brad Frost, a leading voice in design systems. Together, we explore the critical intersection between adaptable […]

If you’ve dabbled in design systems then you’re no doubt familiar with Brad Frost and atomic design. He’s laid the foundation for design systems teams around the world. So in this discussion we talk about the types of challenges he […]

I was recently a guest on the CodingCatDev podcast, where we covered a lot of ground around design systems, including the design system ecosystem, the idea of a Global Design System, and many of the challenges teams face when creating […]

I recently published an article outlining the need for a Global Design System. In my post I stated: A Global Design System would improve the quality and accessibility of the world’s web experiences, save the world’s web designers and developers […]

As organizations race to deliver best-in-class digital experiences to their customers, the ability to innovate has become essential. Building a strong foundation is no longer the end-all-be-all to success; it’s also the ability to reimagine what’s possible tomorrow that truly […]

We’ve all watched with simultaneous fascination and trepidation as a flood of AI-powered tools continues to wash over the digital landscape. At Big Medium, we help complex organizations design at scale and pragmatically adopt new technologies, so naturally we’ve been […]