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Amazon Web Services: Design System
Design Systems, a term that is easily misunderstood among many of us or within the industry. Why? Well, it's because we all have our own conclusions about what is a Design System. I don't personally think there are any right or wrong ways of creating a DS (Short of Design System). I believe that it all depends on what is the scale of the company you are working for whatever that is small or big. This is where the difference should be more affected by. We can go deeper on ABDZ if you wanna know more about Design Systems. Today, we are showcasing the work of Michal Simkovic who worked on the visual design of the design system for Amazon Web Services. Aside from the work itself, I love how he credits his team from the research and UX. I am sure making a design system at this scale is not a "one-solo-show". Congrats to everyone from Amazon Web Services! Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest cloud service platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery, and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Millions of customers are leveraging AWS to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability, and reliability. Basically: Half of the internet is down? Yup, that’s most likely AWS. Even right now, reading this case study, you’re using AWS infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is a dream client of every designer. Where else would you get to design so many tables?! It took us almost a year since the inception till the first service (client) onboarding. I was responsible for the visual design. There were many folks working on research and UX part of the project, and folks selling the whole thing up the chain (please see the credits on the bottom, since a lot of them don't have Behance account). More Links Personal Site Behance
Iconography Guidelines Inspiration
Currently in the middle of setting things up to build a design system at a large scale, for where I am currently working. One of the starting points are the icons who are part of the foundation of a design system. I decided to surf around for UI layout inspiration and I stumbled across the work of Ramotion. A UI/UX design & branding agency based in San Francisco, California that we have featured their work before on ABDZ. I thought it would be cool to share their latest round-up of UI collection based on Iconography, check it out. More Links Studio Site Behance Iconography is a unified visual language that can be understood by people from different locations and cultures. Icons are widely used for navigation in social places such as airports, train stations, production halls, museums, etc. They let people overcome a language barrier and navigate comfortably in conditions when the time is very limited (e.g. in an airport). The same principles apply to iconography systems for digital products. The right usage of icons helps to make in-product navigation more accessible and increase business metrics (CTR, number of successful onboarding sessions, etc.). Consistency, readability, and scalability are the core parameters of any design system. Consistency influences a general trustworthiness of a product, readability increases the speed of interactions, and scalability lets your product to grow effectively. Iconography Guidelines
UXPin introducing Adele: The repository of publicly available design systems and pattern libraries
The kind folks from UXPin is launching Adele. A free and open source repository of pattern libraries. You should definitely check out their library, it's pretty complete if not will be. They are launching with 43 systems analyzed in 30 categories, give it a whirl. The ever growing complexity of web and mobile products have outgrown our product development processes. What used to work in the early days of the web, started to produce diminishing returns. To get a hold of the chaos of digital creation, companies started to invest into design systems and pattern libraries. More Links Learn more about Adele: adele.uxpin.com In their Words Adele is an open source repository of publicly available design systems and pattern libraries. In no time you can get a list of systems that use a particular technology, data structure or have a part of the system that you’re interested in. Whether you’re looking for react components, css-in-js, accessibility guidelines or color palettes — Adele has you covered. Learn, explore, enjoy and build better systems! We’re starting with 43 systems analyzed in 30 categories. You can conveniently browse them on Adele’s website. But… there’s going to be more. From the grounds up Adele has been created as an open source tool for the community of design systems builders and maintainers. Adele is on the mission to collect information about all the publicly available design systems. And this is exactly why Adele is open source. All the data about systems is available as individual JSONs. Anybody can contribute by refining the data or adding new systems. If you don’t see your system in Adele, you found some missing data, or you’re willing to add another category of data — by all means, do it! Only together we can make this repository complete. Surprise. Adele — Design Systems Repository, has not been named after Adele — the singer. Adele is a tribute to one of the most important computer scientists focused on graphic user interfaces, design patterns and object-oriented programming — Adele Goldeberg.