Vitaly Friedman recently shared a compilation of flowcharts illustrating the selection and contribution process for design system components.
I’d like to highlight a few key points.
Nord Design System
https://nordhealth.design/contributing
This system distinguishes light, medium and heavy contributions.
Zalando Design System
https://medium.com/zalando-design/zalandos-design-system-contribution-model-73ab36f8591e
Similarly to Nord, Zalando recognizes 3 levels of contributions:
Light: when making a small design tweak to existing components
Medium: when making a bigger change to an existing component
Heavy: when creating a brand new component
Primer Design System
https://primer.style/guides/contribute/handling-new-patterns
GitHub sets a high bar for accepting new components into Primer.
Blocks Design System
https://web.archive.org/web/20240302170247/https://blocks.cbrebuild.com/help/newblock/
Blocks only includes patterns shared across multiple products to prevent the system from exploding.
Additional resources
Contribution classification and approaches
In his article, Nathan Curtis classifies contributions and advises to approach them differently:
- A fix of a defect. While mostly relevant to code (like an IE11 bug), this also extends to an erroneous Sketch library symbol label or doc site’s guideline.
- A small enhancement where an architecture otherwise remains stable, such as adding an alert color (orange for “new”) to an existing set (red for “error,” green for “success,” and so on).
- A large enhancement extends an existing feature, such as an alert’s dismissibility, description, and position (inline, block, or viewport-locked).
- A new feature is self evident, such as adding a new alert component.
Example:
Make small changes autonomous, frequent, and very fast from start to finish.
Contributions in check
Wart Burggraaf’s article about keeping design system contributions in check provides examples of handy artifacts for component contribution such as Definition of Ready.
Documentation
Slava Shestopalova wrote a great piece on documentation: Why do they ignore my awesome design documentation?
People tend to ignore documentation created in isolation from them, without their involvement and feedback.
Figma templates