Design system inspiration series: the preface

In the quest for a better grasp of design systems, I'm examining a number of popular design systems to see how they work at a practical level.

They are selected based on an arbitrary combination of subjective preference, variation of approaches (eg. what are the different ways of defining typography design tokens?), and active usage (ie. actually used in products, ideally ones that I can observe) at the time of writing.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive study, but rather to get myself familiar with common approaches. I'm not adding new entries for the foreseeable future.

• Carbon by IBM
• Lightning by Salesforce
• Polaris by Shopify
• The USA Government design system
• The UK Government design system

note

At the moment I have only documented the "Typography" part. More will be added if/when I need to learn about

General design system-related resources:

• https://designsystems.com
• https://designsystemsrepo.com
• Component Encyclopedia, a showcase of UI components from public Storybooks