From the course: Creating a Design System with Adobe XD

What is a design system? - Adobe XD Tutorial

From the course: Creating a Design System with Adobe XD

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What is a design system?

- [Instructor] What is a design system? Let's look at some quotes from big names in the design systems world. "A design system is a scalable framework "for decisions and team behaviors across a product portfolio "to converge on a cohesive experience." This is from Nathan Curtis, author with great articles on medium, books. He now works with companies, showing them how to build and maintain design systems. "The design system provides the structure "and the underlying experiential through-line "that unites our products." This is from Shawn Cheris, director of design at Adobe behind Spectrum, our internal design system. Out of curiosity, do you know how many icons Photoshop has? The answer is 1,400. Can you imagine managing all that? "A design system is an operating system "but for user experiences." This is from Jeoff Wilks, director at IBM focused on Carbon, a very robust design system. "In a business, a design system "plays the role of a facilitator and curator. "It gives you that historical consciousness "of what's been done in the past "while allowing you to be deliberate "about how you design for the future." This is from Hayley. She used to work at Airbnb behind the DLS, design language system, another great reference in design systems. She's now at Shopify. Now that we know what a design system is from different perspectives, let's see what it's not. It's not a set of static designs, a design bible, that's sitting somewhere where no one goes to. It's not a pattern library that only documents designs or something that's already created. It's not magic. It's not the glue that will fix everything. It's not a dictator that forces teams to comply with the norms. Governance is one of the biggest challenges in design systems, and it's not easy. Not easy to create, not easy to maintain, or to get buy-in, but it's worth it. A design system is institutionalized knowledge coming from brand, product, UX design, marketing, engineering, content, business stakeholders. Pretty much everything, every department involved in the creation of a good product. It's a living product with constant feedback loops. You have to treat it as a product in order to be successful. It's anything governed by design decisions, and it's focused on consistency, alignment, and performance, and it's a great place to exercise resilience, discipline, stewardship, this idea of caring, and to have an inclusive mindset. Now that we know what a design system is, let's see why we need one.

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