Interestingly, we\u2019ve been looking at possibilities of theming design systems for some time, and I\u2019ve just happened upon this article by Brad Frost (yes, he who coined the phrase \u2018atomic design\u2019).<\/p>\n

Design systems should, in almost all cases, be created as atomic, and indeed most of us have been do this for years – we hadn\u2019t named it but still.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lately at Splendid we\u2019ve been hypothesising about the appropriateness of theming design systems. It\u2019s completely true that we often start from a basic library in order to avoid reinventing wheels, \u00a0just when does that become a brand element and at what point does it not come useable for another brand?<\/p>\n

A challenge we\u2019ve had from our own organisation and others is \u201cwhy can\u2019t we just use that design system but brand it for this new brand?\u201d. The answer has been \u201cwell we can, but we are still go to have to redesign the system at an atomic level to give to the development teams.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have always been pretty restricted by the constraints of CSS, meaning once we change colour, typeface it\u2019s not really looking much different. Just coloured in. \u00a0What we really want is th ability to specify behaviour, size, location, colour, font, animation, transition… etc etc etc.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to work with our development teams to see how much we can move those constraints using this theme-able approach, and see if we can find some instances in which it\u2019ll save us time.<\/p>\n

I suspect the answer might be a combination of yes but:<\/p>\n

a) it\u2019s time consuming<\/p>\n

b) it\u2019s costly<\/p>\n

c) it\u2019s constrained still, and therefore only appropriate for a subset of situations<\/p>\n

… but let\u2019s see.<\/p>\n

Read the article here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interestingly, we\u2019ve been looking at possibilities of theming design systems for some time, and I\u2019ve just happened upon this article by Brad Frost (yes, he who coined the phrase \u2018atomic design\u2019). Design systems should, in almost all cases, be created as atomic, and indeed most of us have been do this for years – we…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/0FB72AA0-6790-4B3A-AF96-94A5A83FD08D.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions\/300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.benedictireland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}