Saturday, April 27, 2024

The key lessons I learned creating a popular Design System by Matt Bond

atlassian design system

We solve common problems and provide a foundation for teams to build on. We avoid consistency for the sake of consistency and reject infinite flexibility. This means evolving our design language and infrastructure for the future of Atlassian design, through things like tokens.

Use a component

A special thank you to our Atlassian Design System teammates for their participation in the workshops and co-creation of our new values and principles. We facilitated two workshops with 30 people in a fully remote setting. One workshop focused on values while the other focused on principles. At a high level, values are fundamental beliefs and what we hold true. The strengths of our design system and team center around these core values. We strongly believe in the power of co-creation to capture the perspectives of our diverse, multi-disciplinary team.

How to build your first design system

When Atlassian expanded their focus on design in 2012, Jürgen Spangl was hired as the new Head of Design. One of the first projects he initiated was creating the Atlassian Design Guidelines (ADG) – their new internal design system. This part houses all our individual UI components, organised according to Atomic Design principles. This is the source of truth to be referred to by anyone implementing the UI.

Components

We’ve published our values and principles on atlassian.design for everyone to use (and hold us accountable for). We’ve been highlighting the usage in our team rituals and conversations. We’ll continue to look into new ways to encourage adoption, such as adding questions to help the team apply these principles. Our building blocks work together to create a suite of products that feel familiar, cohesive, and part of a family. The milestone we’ve reached has been an amazing multi-disciplinary and cross-collaborative effort across multiple Atlassian teammates, in collaboration with the Atlassian Design System Team. Deep appreciation goes to all the team members involved in making this launch happen and for continuing to help us scale design and development at Atlassian.

Design courses launched to support business innovation - University of Sydney

Design courses launched to support business innovation.

Posted: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 07:00:00 GMT [source]

atlassian design system

If you have considered creating one for your product or company, are in the process of making one, or have tried and given up, hopefully these insights will help you create a better design system for your company. Atlassian Design System, ATL for short, is a design system which mission is to create simple, intuitive, and beautiful experiences for their end-users. Atlassian’s products include Jira, Trello, and Confluence, so their design system needs to work across those products plus serve for people who built internal product and more. Foundations are the visual elements needed to create engaging end-to-end user experiences. This includes guidance on iconography, typography, layout and structure.

Understanding design systems is important especially if you want to stay ahead of the curve and deliver the best user experiences possible. Learn more about how to create design systems with this tutorial to take the next step. There were many attempts at Atlassian to redesign the product suite before the groundwork of documenting our system components was satisfactory. It took a long time to build the architecture of the system that but it made it easier (and faster) for Atlassian to refresh the visual language later on because the foundations were solid. A properly built design system is truly a gold standard — from the general building blocks of every piece of design, through the UI patterns, and building up the high-level rules defining the future of the product. We understand how unpleasant it is to navigate across two sites to find the right information you need.

Agile Design

The Atlassian Design System vision, based on our values and principles. Also see the design recommendations in each component (for example, button usage guidelines). Now you should be ready to install and use all design system packages.

Start by doing things that don’t scale

By getting others to follow what you’re doing, and contribute to making the patterns and guidelines better, you will have the buy-in and support you need to really making a difference and build great products. I can’t over-emphasize how critical this is to the success of your systems. Resist the urge to take this as an opportunity to redesign your product.

Finally, plan a process of suggesting new patterns to make sure that everyone in the product team has a say in the evolution of the design system. Throughout the process, we made sure the values and principles stayed close to the team’s original beliefs and intent (what we hold true). We constantly referred back to the workshop discussions, groupings, and voting exercises as we sparred drafts.

atlassian design system

To create a design system for an existing website, analyze current design patterns, identify reusable elements, establish guidelines, and document components for consistency. A UX UI design system is a comprehensive set of principles, patterns, and assets that guide the creation of user-centered interfaces, ensuring a cohesive and consistent user experience. Design Systems play a vital role in streamlining the website design and development process, as well as enhancing consistency, efficiency, and scalability. Providing a centralized repository of design assets and guidelines empowers teams to build cohesive and quality sites and apps. Not the most glamorous of design systems, but believe it or not the U.S government actually has design principles and guidelines for their online touch-points! Over the last year, our cross-disciplinary team has accomplished so much to bring the new design system site to life.

These patterns help maintain layout and usability consistency throughout the interface. In a design system, all the design principles, visual assets, and patterns are thoroughly documented. One of my personal favorite design systems, Atlassian makes project management and collaboration tools like Jira and Trello that are used by thousands of teams worldwide. Their focus is on agile tools for agile teams by helping them stay on track as they plan, develop, and deliver products.

Creating a system and redesigning your app at the same time is going to slow you down significantly. It is much easier to document what you have today, both the good and the bad patterns, and then fix the bad patterns with a redesign of the visual language afterwards. The ADG team is regularly exploring changes and consolidations to the design system.

This is creating a custom design system from scratch, i.e., you are implementing a design system to meet the unique needs of your website and brand. Its toolbox is filled with pre-built components, a style guide outlining visual elements, and a set of design principles explaining the reasons behind creating user-centered interfaces. It's a single source of truth for everything that makes up your website's look and feel. Design Systems are a collection of reusable components, patterns, and guidelines that serve as the foundation for designing and building websites. It encompasses not only visual elements but also the underlying principles and rules governing their use.

We strive to make our design system work for everyone who relies on it, regardless of discipline, skill level, or tenure. By enabling as many people as possible to use the system, we multiply our impact. While convenient to author and publish early on, long term risks may outweigh benefits. Sibling sites can indicate a corrosive divide between design and engineering, too. The Atlassian Design System Team is pleased to announce that our new home for Atlassian Design System is now live at atlassian.design!

See each component’s code documentation for individual package installation instructions. These are required for our components to work as expected in light and dark mode (coming soon). This page lists how to use Atlassian's design system components and developer tools.

It's their master plan, the source of all truth and a reference to make sure that everyone who works on their product is always on the same page, consistent and in agreeance with the way things should be. Ben Brignell maintains principles.design as an open source resource. Design doesn’t scale easily because it’s a mixture of art and science.

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