Table Of Content
The process is made much easier since each product has its own ADG representative to collaborate with a member of the design systems team. Now 5 years later, Atlassian Design has grown to almost 200 people while the design system governs the brand and its 12 products across multiple devices, platforms, and marketing properties. It was challenging to know when and how to use some of our components / other platform components and when to design new ones. As Nathan Curtis says, a design system isn’t a project – it’s a product serving products. Once the first version rolls out, the governance and iteration never ends.
Learn Atlassian’s design guidelines
The need for websites with a good user experience cannot be over-emphasized in this day and age. So those are our choices for top design systems and what you can learn from them. Hopefully, this will have you seeing them in a new light; as learning tools and resources to help you understand UI, UX and product design better and give you inspiration when applying it to your own work. We utilized a centralized model which allowed for every designer in the company to contribute.
How Atlassian Design System Was Built
Discuss with the team to decide which version of these elements will be canonical. Design systems are exactly that – a better method and process for Lego-like design and development. A way for teams to industrialize the menial work so they can focus on the core problems.
Unify your visual design
For instance, if you open up an icon library like react-icons, you will notice each collection has a unique and distinct feel. Below are the design systems which are often utilized by Open UI for research purposes. Over the course of 2013, and with Atlassian doubling in size nearly every year, I had basically onboarded about 500 people about the importance of our design system and how they can use it. I found this to be a really effective way of changing the company culture with regard to design. Without doing something that didn’t scale, we might have taken a lot longer to get started. When you’re working on your system, try not to get too obsessed with over-engineering a seamless, perfect workflow but instead look for scrappy ways to start, and just keep making progress if it’s working.
When a designer needs to whip up a new landing page, all the pre-designed UI symbol elements are ready to drop in and can be non-destructably edited. When a marketer needs to send out a newsletter, there is no question as to the kind of tone the copy should be written in or what the header image should be. It's all there, clearly laid out and because everyone has discussed, contributed to and agreed upon it there is no question as to what and how things need to be done.
Agile Design
We're on a mission to make it easy for teams to design, develop, and deliver high-quality Atlassian UI. A common misconception about design systems is that once they’re established, or, in this case, once their documentation is published or site is launched, they become an omnipotent and an unchangeable source of truth. Modern technologies like CSS make it easy to separate the look of an application from the logic in an application. Likewise, make sure to structure automated tests so they will be resilient when the visual design evolves.
Back in 2013 the designer to engineer ratio was something in the range of 1 designer to every 15–20 engineers. While I shudder at the thought of that number today, back then I tried to use that imbalance to my advantage. Something that helped me get the engineering org on my side at Atlassian was to create a talk for new starters during their first week of onboarding at the company. About 15 or so people would be there every week and I’d be able to get them to understand what we were trying to do from day 1.
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Everyone approaches and thinks of values and principles differently, so we started by gathering inspiration from other design systems. Then we crafted clear definitions of what values and principles mean to us, along with where they fit with our strategy, mission, and vision. Our building blocks work together to create products that feel familiar, cohesive, and part of a family. Our Figma libraries and tools include our foundational styles, design tokens, components, and other helpers. Usually, the safest approach is to analyze existing systems to see which ones are the closest to your brand and needs.
The key lessons I learned creating a popular Design System
In a nutshell, a design system is a collection of documents, articles, examples, code snippets, screenshots, design guidelines, components, philosophies and other digital assets for a product design company. Think of it as a big knowledge-base that is part UI kit, part documentation with instructions, language and coding guidelines all wrapped up together. Each component meets a specific interaction or UI need, and has been specifically created to work together to create patterns and intuitive user experiences.
As I mentioned above, the Atlassian design team at the start of 2013 was relatively small (~13 people) compared to the engineering team (~300 people). One of the benefits of including written guidelines was that engineers could make a huge amount of progress without a designer there. It meant that we could stop designing screens in Sketch and instead, jump on a whiteboard and brainstorm a flow, or start to work on much bigger product problems that existed upstream. With the uptick in design systems discussions over the last couple of years, I’m occasionally asked for tips or insights from my experience building the design system at Atlassian.
It began with extensive audits across our content, design, tooling, and code. We applied the visual foundations of our design system and reused existing components to design and build the new site, truly putting our design system to the test. Starting from an existing Design System with a similar Component & Pattern Library might set you up with a great start.
We want to do this again, not only because it was fun but also because it’s a great way to get creative and empathize with designers using our design system. Where your team easily can discover, collect and share visual content relevant to different projects. After the rollout of the first version, a design system becomes a journey that never ends. Finally, make sure you implement your icon library and other styles.
Bring React, Storybook or npm components to a design tool and keep designers and developers in sync. The primary benefit of design systems is their ability to replicate designs quickly by utilising pre-made UI components and elements. Teams can continue to use the same elements over and over, reducing the need to reinvent the wheel and thus risking unintended inconsistency. The Design System (DS) is single source of truth for our interface design. It contains all of elements used in our UI, along with rules and guidelines on how to implement them. Perhaps also some interactive patterns (hover on clickable elements), border visual properties, or maybe animations?
Atlassian Design System values and principles work in tandem with all of the others, not in place of them. They help our team align on what kind of design system we want to build at Atlassian, what needs we address, and how we address them. And they’re not just for our design system team — we hope to use them to enable contribution in the future.
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