Spring 2024
The design systems websites I visited were:
- Apple’s human interface guidelines
- Adobe’s spectrum
- GitLab’s pajamas
- The Guardian’s digital design system
And here’s what I learned:
1) The Guardian rocks
Both in terms of design system and web design. I learned about design systems through this website, which was built to not only explain the Guardian’s design system and keep it consistent, but to educate the user on what design systems even are. I appreciated the emphasis on typography and layout, which I guess is to be expected form a newspaper company. Still, it was fun to see them putting so much thought into spacing, like the amount of space after a headline or something, as a way to make the content easy to navigate, sure, but also to look good. Very cool. One little tidbit I’ll definitely be stealing in my designs is the Guardian’s approach to highlighting text. I just think it looks rad and serves a good purpose.
2) The whole voice thing
I can’t figure out if it’s creepy or reassuring that mega corporations are crafting a “voice” for themselves that involves grammar choices and humorous restraint. It would seem that all of these companies would like an even, balanced, neutral, accessible tone of voice; one that doesn’t crack wise or use hip lingo and keeps its diction sub-stratospheric. I’m not criticizing this effort to have a voice, I think it’s a good thing. I’m just wondering, given the homogeneity of these voices, why it even needs to be a section in their design system. I kind of assumed that companies large enough to even have a design system would automatically assume this sort of HAL 9000 tone, without having to specify that “ok this is our tone.” Who knows, maybe it’s a tax thing.
3) It’s all about empathy
Which is great, don’t get me wrong. I know I can be a real downer in these blogs, but I’m not about to put empathy on blast (but if you’d like to read something in which empathy is very much on blast, Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy is pretty interesting, also the Dalai Lama has a thing or two to say about empathy and compassion being mutually exclusive). It’s just that this sort of empathy seems to limit design options to just a handful of useful and interesting layouts, components, interactions, etc., and wouldn’t that contribute, like the voice thing, to an ever-increasing homogeneity across platforms? Is this good? I’m asking you because I really don’t know. An unintuitive, hard-to-navigate, inaccessible website or app is a bummer for sure. But what happens when they’re all the same? What will our perceptions be of a company that chooses not to be the same? Is it possible that our awareness of a company’s misdeeds could be overlooked, outweighed, or otherwise mitigated by having a design system that ticks all the correct boxes?