Design Systems
Components as a versioned internal product, with adoption and deprecation like any API.
5 to work through
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beginner Multiple choice
Two applications in the same company ship what should be the same primary button, and after a rebrand the shades differ by one step. A third application's button is the old colour entirely. What is the underlying cause, and which change prevents recurrence?
3 min answer -
intermediate
A design system exists, is well built, and teams keep building their own components anyway. What is the diagnosis?
1 min answer -
intermediate
A design system is adopted and product teams still build their own components. What is the diagnosis?
2 min answer -
intermediate
Three product teams have forked the design system to meet deadlines. Components have diverged. How do you recover?
2 min answer -
intermediate
Your design system is used by three of eleven applications. The other eight built their own components. What do you do?
2 min answer
2 terms in this topic
Component Library Versioning
Treating a design system as a versioned product with a compatibility policy and a deprecation process, because its consumers cannot all upgrade at once.
conceptDesign System
A versioned library of components, tokens and patterns that encodes an organisation's interface decisions as reusable code.
Neighbouring topics
Frontend & Experience Architecture
General material on architecting the surface the user actually touches.
Rendering Strategies
Client, server, static and incremental rendering, and what each costs on first paint.
Edge Rendering
Running the render close to the user, and the personalisation and cache trade it implies.
Hydration Cost
The gap between visible and interactive, and the JavaScript that closes it.
Micro-Frontends
Independent deployment of UI slices, and the shared runtime that undermines it.
Module Federation
Loading code from another build at runtime, with versioning and failure to think about.
UI Monorepo Strategy
One repository for many front ends, and the build graph that makes it viable.
Component Contracts
Props, slots and events as an interface, and the breaking change hidden in a style.
Client State Architecture
Server state, UI state and derived state, and why conflating them causes most bugs.
Client Caching & Data Layer
Stale-while-revalidate, invalidation and optimistic updates on the client.
BFF for Experience
One backend per experience, shaped by the screen rather than by the domain.
API Shapes for UI
REST, GraphQL and RPC judged by over-fetching, round trips and client coupling.
Web Performance Budgets
A number a build can fail against, rather than a performance sprint once a year.
Core Web Vitals
LCP, INP and CLS — what they measure, and the architecture that moves them.
Accessibility Architecture
Semantics, focus management and announcements designed in rather than audited in.
Internationalisation
Locale, direction, pluralisation and dates as structural concerns, not string tables.
Client Feature Flags
Flag evaluation on a device you do not control, and the flicker and staleness it brings.
Real User Monitoring
Field data from real devices and networks, against the synthetic run that looked fine.
Frontend Security
CSP, XSS, CSRF, token storage, and the trust boundary that ends at the browser.