#50 - Design that scales

Hi folks,

Here are a few things I thought were worth sharing this week.

Building design systems #

“…when you invest in aligning and co-ordinating designers, design does scale.”

In Design Doesn’t Scale, Stanley Wood, Design Director at Spotify discusses how developing design principles, UI guidelines and the acronym ‘TUNE’ helped a team of distributed designers create one coherent experience.

“A well-designed UI system should be composable. Much like functions are composed together to complete more complex tasks. Components can be composed together to create more complex UI patterns.”

Lately I’ve been enjoying the honest and well articulated writing of Varun Vachhar. In Components Varun talks about his struggle to understanding the composition of UI systems.

Making profits from a design system is an interesting read for anyone looking for tips on building design systems in Sketch. A few good plugin ideas in there too.

Typography and Grid #

“Typographic decisions are usually made on a brand level—with considerations for look, feel, and accurate expression of a brand’s desired direction. But what about UI? It’s often referenced that 90% of UI is text, which holds true for Airbnb, so changing the typeface brought a significant change to our UI design”

Karri Saarinen on How Airbnb introduced Cereal to their UI

Rachel Andrew and Jen Simmons have teamed up to create Master CSS Grid. A series of video tutorials and resources to help you master CSS Grid Layout

For your ears #

First up this cover of Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box by Ramin Djawadi which Westworld fans will recognise from Season 2. Different to the original but no less brilliant.

Finally, I found focus this week by playing Jesper Ryom - Chants through Youtubeonrepeat. It amazes me how effective this is.