Design Systems, when and how much? — Diana Mounter
summary
Design system work at GitHub starts by fixing concrete pain points: audit finds 2,449 hex values scattered across CSS, only 38% of github.com uses the system, and engineers are rewriting CSS for routine UI changes. The team introduces utilities (single-purpose classes), an 8px spacing scale, a BEM-like convention and object-oriented CSS, ships Primer CSS and Sketch UI kits, and sees faster updates and far fewer bespoke styles while planning React components to further reduce markup friction.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction to design systems
- 1:09Defining design systems
- 3:53Components of a system
- 5:30GitHub's current system state
- 6:43The need for a system at GitHub
- 9:17Implementing utilities and scales
- 11:53Auditing and documentation
- 14:15Impact on workflow
- 16:03Scaling and future challenges
- 18:15When to build a system
