The Story of My Failed Design System
Originally published at https://blog.joonquixote.com/en/posts/the-story-of-my-failed-design-system/ . There are plenty of articles about design systems. Many organizations have shared stories about adopting them in practice, and there is no shortage of conference talks and articles about designing tokens. What is harder to find are stories about design systems that were built but never made it…
In the spring of 2022, a design system project began within the company to reduce duplication among frontend stacks used by different teams. The initial goal was to create a shared system for teams in the division. Web Components were chosen as the foundation, leading to the implementation of components such as tabs, pagination, and tree.
The library was released within the division and adopted by another team, providing valuable feedback for further development. In early 2024, the author joined a task force to extend the design system, aiming to bridge the gap between Figma designs and developer code. The project explored using an intermediate representation, DST (Design Syntax Tree), and eventually developed it into DSML (Design System Markup Language), which acted as a shared language for representing and exchanging Figma designs.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
