Monzo – Tone of Voice
Monzo’s guidelines for tone of voice, including a reference to “the curse of knowledge.”
Tags: guide
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Friday, April 13th, 2018
Wednesday, March 21st, 2018
Hudl Uniform
This design system takes an interesting approach, splitting the documentation between designing and coding.
Vox Product Accessibility Guidelines
Accessibility isn’t a checklist …but this checklist is a pretty damn good starting point. I really like that it’s organised by audience: designers, engineers, project managers, QA, and editorial. You can use this list as a starting point for creating your own—tick whichever items you want to include, and a handy copy/paste-able version will be generated for you.
The first visual identity for UK Parliament
Some lovely branding work for the UK Parliament, presented very nicely.
Saturday, March 10th, 2018
Useful accessibility resources
A whoooole bunch of links about inclusive design, gathered together from a presentation.
Thursday, January 25th, 2018
Design ops for design systems
Leading Design was one of the best events I attended last year. To be honest, that surprised me—I wasn’t sure how relevant it would be to me, but it turned out to be the most on-the-nose conference I could’ve wished for.
Seeing as the event was all about design leadership, there was inevitably some talk of design ops. But I noticed that the term was being used in two different ways.
Sometimes a speaker would talk about design ops and mean “operations, specifically for designers.” That means all the usual office practicalities—equipment, furniture, software—that designers might need to do their jobs. For example, one of the speakers recommended having a dedicated design ops person rather than trying to juggle that yourself. That’s good advice, as long as you understand what’s meant by design ops in that context.
There’s another context of use for the phrase “design ops”, and it’s one that we use far more often at Clearleft. It’s related to design systems.
Now, “design system” is itself a term that can be ambiguous. See also “pattern library” and “style guide”. Quite a few people have had a stab at disambiguating those terms, and I think there’s general agreement—a design system is the overall big-picture “thing” that can contain a pattern library, and/or a style guide, and/or much more besides:
- Styleguides, Pattern Libraries and Design Languages
- Design Systems vs. Pattern Libraries vs. Style Guides – What’s the Difference?
- Design Systems, Style Guides, and Pattern Libraries: Oh My!
- What’s the difference between style guides, pattern libraries, and design systems?
None of those great posts attempt to define design ops, and that’s totally fair, because they’re all attempting to define things—style guides, pattern libraries, and design systems—whereas design ops isn’t a thing, it’s a practice. But I do think that design ops follows on nicely from design systems. I think that design ops is the practice of adopting and using a design system.
There are plenty of posts out there about the challenges of getting people to use a design system, and while very few of them use the term design ops, I think that’s what all of them are about:
- Why Design Systems Fail
- Tips for in-house teams in a free market software culture
- Putting your design system into practice
Clearly design systems and design ops are very closely related: you really can’t have one without the other. What I find interesting is that a lot of the challenges relating to design systems (and pattern libraries, and style guides) might be technical, whereas the challenges of design ops are almost entirely cultural.
I realise that tying design ops directly to design systems is somewhat limiting, and the truth is that design ops can encompass much more. I like Andy’s description:
Design Ops is essentially the practice of reducing operational inefficiencies in the design workflow through process and technological advancements.
Now, in theory, that can encompass any operational stuff—equipment, furniture, software—but in practice, when we’re dealing with design ops, 90% of the time it’s related to a design system. I guess I could use a whole new term (design systems ops?) but I think the term design ops works well …as long as everyone involved is clear on the kind of design ops we’re all talking about.
Friday, January 12th, 2018
clean-code-javascript
Opinionated ideas on writing JavaScript. I like it when people share their approaches like this.
Thursday, January 11th, 2018
TNZ Pattern Library Docs
New Zealand has a pattern library (in Fractal, no less).
Friday, January 5th, 2018
Herman: Automated Pattern Libraries | OddBird
A lightweight style guide generator. This one uses SassDoc to parse out the documentation for colours, type, etc.
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018
Back to Bradshaw’s / Paul Robert Lloyd
I really like getting Paul’s insights into building his Bradshaw’s Guide project. Here he shares his process for typography, images and geolocation.
Friday, December 29th, 2017
Array Explorer
Oh, this is going to be so useful to future me! Sarah has put together a handy guide to all the JavaScript methods for manipulating arrays.
Thursday, December 14th, 2017
Why Design Systems Fail ◆ 24 ways
Great advice from Una on getting buy-in and ensuring the long-term success of a design system.
Monday, December 4th, 2017
A11Y Style Guide
A library of accessible UI elements that you can use as a starting point, complete with HTML and CSS. Alas, no JavaScript, but there’s always Heydon’s inclusive components for that.
Tuesday, November 28th, 2017
Design Systems Handbook - DesignBetter.Co
A weirdly over-engineered online book with bizarre scrolljacking (I would advise disabling JavaScript but then all the links stop working so you won’t be able to go past the table of contents) but it’s free and the content—by Marco Suarez, Jina Anne, Katie Sylor-Miller, Diana Mounter, and Roy Stanfield— looks good:
A design system unites product teams around a common visual language. It reduces design debt, accelerates the design process, and builds bridges between teams working in concert to bring products to life. Learn how you can create your design system and help your team improve product quality while reducing design debt.
Monday, November 27th, 2017
A collection of awesome design systems
A table of design systems, pattern libraries, style guides, or whatever we’re calling them.
Wednesday, November 15th, 2017
Design Guidelines — The way products are built.
A collection of publicly available design systems, pattern libraries, and interface guidelines.
Wednesday, November 1st, 2017
Distilling How We Think About Design Systems
Advice on building design systems:
- If you can avoid being ambiguous, please do.
- Favor common understanding over dictionary correctness.
- Make great operations a priority.
- Don’t get trapped in defining things instead of explaining things.
Monday, October 23rd, 2017
Voice Guidelines | Clearleft
I love what Ben is doing with this single-serving site (similar to my design principles collection)—it’s a collection of handy links and resources around voice UI:
Designing a voice interface? Here’s a useful list of lists: as many guiding principles as we could find, all in one place. List compiled and edited by Ben Sauer @bensauer.
BONUS ITEM: Have him run a voice workshop for you!
Thursday, October 19th, 2017
Design Systems | susan jean robertson
Susan reviews Alla’s superb book on design systems:
If you’re interested in or wanting to create a design system or improve the one you have or get buy in to take your side project at work and make it part of the normal work flow, read this book. And even better, get your colleagues to do the same, so you’ll have a shared understanding before you begin the hard work to build your own system.
Susan also published her highlights from the book. I really like that!
Wednesday, October 4th, 2017
18F: Digital service delivery | Building a large-scale design system: How we created a design system for the U.S. government
Maya Benari provides an in-depth walkthrough of 18F’s mission to create a consistent design system for many, many different government sites.
When building out a large-scale design system, it can be hard to know where to start. By focusing on the basics, from core styles to coding conventions to design principles, you can create a strong foundation that spreads to different parts of your team.
There’s an interface inventory, then mood boards, then the work starts on typography and colour, then white space, and finally the grid system.
The lessons learned make for good design principles:
- Talk to the people
- Look for duplication of efforts
- Know your values
- Empower your team
- Start small and iterate
- Don’t work in a vacuum
- Reuse and specialize
- Promote your system
- Be flexible