Smashing Meets: Design Systems

I took the moderator’s seat for a recent Smashing Meets discussion on design systems. Brad Frost, Ben Callahan, and Nathan Curtis sat in as panelists, which was a real dang treat for me because I rarely get the chance to talk shop with adults, unless you count my wife nodding along politely at the dinner table.

The discussion was predictably rich with that lineup of design system buffs. I learned a lot about the strategies, purposes, and implementations behind design system work — and there’s a lot of moving pieces to consider when we’re talking about creating and caring for a consistent language for visual design in team environments. These folks are just smart.

I’m clearly the layman in this bunch. I’m more on the user interaction side of things, but that only means I had large stack of questions I was eager to put in front of them. But more than that, these are folks I’ve known virtually — 10+ years in one case — but have never actually spoken to live like this. What a blast to finally connect in real time to talk about nerdy design stuff.