Stream

This is a story of light theme’s redemption. So sit back, remove your protective eyewear, and let’s go on a journey. Maybe you’ll even find yourself using light theme in the coming days. That said, you probably don’t use light theme today.

In 2016, Slack was two years old and already used by millions of people. Our codebase had grown rapidly, and like many companies that focused on product/market fit, our code was built in a way that favored time-to-market over maintainability, consistency, or reusability.

The scrollbar is a humble but productive mechanism that operates as the primary means through which one can traverse a document.

Product design for web and mobile is evolving at a fast pace. As the range of devices and platforms continues to expand, so do the various design considerations. Design systems help a design team build a framework that meets their needs by bringing together all of the critical design components - in one place.

I’ve never really been happy about the way I’ve worked with typography in design systems before. As I’m currently working on another big design system, it seemed time to change that. Let’s deconstruct these a bit.

I sometimes work with other designers helping them to translate their design atmosphere and wide screen layouts into responsive designs. Breaking down their designs into systems is big part of what I do.

This article, explains what components are, how they work, and give you a set of best practices you can use to incorporate them into your design workflow.

Change aversion, much like change itself, is a divisive topic. One camp asserts that users hate change. Software users have “baby duck syndrome” – imprinting on the first system they learn and judging later iterations by their similarity to the first.

Designing complex applications is a challenging undertaking. Building applications that have both the depth to support complicated tasks and the intuitiveness to make it clear how to get that work done is a tremendous challenge.

Based on the proposed CSS :focus-visible pseudo-selector, this prototype adds a focus-visible class to the focused element, in situations in which the :focus-visible pseudo-selector should match.

A design system by Contentful that intends to reduce the overhead of creating UI by providing tools and guidance for digital teams.

As Slack has rapidly scaled, we've built our own component library that outlines our product foundations and interface elements. In the process, we found that the most important output of our work isn't just the design system, but rather the processes that define how we work together with shifting priorities and a rapidly scaling product. Learn about what we've built, the hiccups we've encountered along the way, and how the work we're doing now will pave the way for an even more powerful Slack in the future.

Helping government teams create and run great digital services that meet the Digital Service Standard. The Service Standard provides the principles of building a good service. This manual explains what teams can do to build great services that will meet the standard.

Design Principles are a set of considerations that form the basis of any good product. Design Principles help teams with decision making. A few simple principles or constructive questions will guide your team towards making appropriate decisions.

From Silicon Valley startups like Airbnb to multi-national companies like IBM, design principles are becoming adopted. But what exactly are design principles? Senior management is very good at establishing goals, but are much worse at clearly defining how the company will achieve those goals.

The most comprehensive collection of design principles on the Internet.

Since the release of our framework a few months ago, we've been asked by many users why we opted for CSS variables, instead of SASS variables, even though we do use SASS in the framework.

Tooltips are messages that appear when the user hovers over part of an interface, usually an icon, to explain how certain things work or what they mean. They then disappear when the user hovers off the element. Adam explains some of the pitfalls with tooltips and offers some alternative advice.

Finally we can demarcate links without sacrificing style thanks to two new CSS properties, text-underline-offset and text-decoration-thickness.

Design systems are great for scaling design across complex organisations and products. But in our drive for scale, consistency and standards, have we considered the risks and the cost? What are the problems we may face and how can we overcome them? In this talk, Mark will expose the ugly truth of rolling out design systems; from engineering and code, to designers and stakeholders and provide guidance from his experience of producing design systems for over a decade.

The Embedded Image Preview (EIP) technique introduced in this article allows us to load preview images during lazy loading using progressive JPEGs, Ajax and HTTP range requests without having to transfer additional data.

Distinguishing between these two actions is critical to avoiding losing users’ work. Save changes before closing a view, use text labels rather than an X icon, and provide a confirmation dialog before destructive actions.