I’m going through a pattern library right now, and this rings true:
I’m of the opinion that all cards in a Card UI are destined to become baby webpages. Just like modals. Baby hero units with baby titles and baby body text and baby dropdown menu of actions and baby call to action bars, etc.
In some ways this outcome is the opposite of what you were intending. You wanted a Card UI where everything was simple and uniform, but what you end up with is a CSS gallery website filled with baby websites.
Whenever I confront a design system problem, I ask myself this one question that guides the way: “What would HTML do?”
HTML is the ultimate composable language. With just a few elements shuffled together you can create wildly different interfaces. And that’s really where all the power from HTML comes up: everything has one job, does it really well (ideally), which makes the possible options almost infinite.
Design systems should hope for the same.
Design systems as codified constraints.
A library of UX components is one common part of a design system, but the system itself is something bigger. A good system is also a shared set of strategies for solving visual and interactive communication challenges, a playbook rather than a script.
I like this way of putting it:
The problem is that treating a design system as a pantry full of widgets is, in and of itself, a failure of both craft and imagination. Think of it like a language: if a writer’s only engagement with it is grabbing words from the dictionary and heaping them together until “message” is achieved, things are going to suck. Language is more than a bag of words.
A beautiful meditation on Christopher Alexander by Claire L. Evans.
I completely agree with Dan that when it comes to design systems, completeness is an over-rated—and even counter-productive—goal:
Some organizations seem to hold up the ideal that, once a design system exists, everything in an interface can and should be built with it. Not only is that an unrealistic goal for most enterprises, but it can often be a toxic mindset that anything less than 100% coverage is misuse of a design system at best or utter failure at worst.
There’s probably a Pace Layer analogy in here somewhere.
Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
Abstracting common interaction patterns as a starting point for accessible components.
A problem shared is a problem halved. And the web has a big problem with awful overlays.
HTML. JavaScript. Why not both?