Designing a Design System
summary
Salesforce builds and ships a company-wide Lightning Design System (SLDS) to unify 17 years of legacy across 20,000 employees and many acquisitions; the team converts a single source of truth into platform artifacts using design tokens and an open toolchain so a color or spacing change propagates to CSS, iOS, Android and Sketch automatically. Automation plus a deprecation tool (sass-deprecated) and a transformer called Theo keep the system current, speed onboarding and reduce one-off fixes while supporting three simultaneous releases.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Start
- 2:33what is a design system?
- 4:1317 years of legacy
- 4:47to design at salesforce is to consider the whole ecosystem
- 8:34have a clear vision to align efforts
- 9:11drive design decisions with design principles
- 11:30clarity efficiency consistency
- 13:32do your research
- 19:20a centralized design systems team
- 21:16federated design system contributors
- 23:50special snowflakes
- 26:57empower designers
- 29:12design tokens - named entities that store design values
- 35:53deprecation
- 38:02zombie style guides
- 38:23human guidance
