This is a really thoughtful piece by Rich, who’s got conflicted feelings about large language models in the design process. I suspect a lot of people can relate to this.
What I do know is that I find LLMs useful on occasion, but every time I use one I die a little inside.
Here’s the transcript of a great talk by Amy on the realities of working on design systems.
Jim shares his thoughts on my recent post about declarative design systems. He picks up on the way I described a declarative design systems as “a predefined set of boundary conditions that can be used to generate components”:
I like this definition of a design system: a set of boundaries. It’s about saying “don’t go there” rather than “you can only go here”. This embraces the idea of constraints as the mother of invention: it opens the door to creativity while keeping things bounded.
I remember Lara telling me a great quote from the Clarity conference a few years back: “A design system needs to be correct before it’s complete.” In other words, it’s better to have one realistic component that’s actually in production than to have a pattern library full of beautiful but unimplemented components. I feel like Robin is getting at much the same point here, but he frames it in terms of correctness and usefulness:
If we want to be correct, okay, let’s have components of everything and an enormous Figma library of stuff we need to maintain. But if we want to be useful to designers who want to get an understanding of the system, let’s be brief.
A great talk by Ethan called The Design Systems Between Us.
Is your design system really a system …or is it more like a collection of components?
The pattern library map is not the design system territory.