Thoughts on a Global Design System
July 26, 2024
As you may or may not be aware, there’s been recent discussion in OpenUI, brought forward by an effort by my fellow Pittsburgher Brad Frost, about the group taking on the effort of creating a global design system.First, let me say that the problem that Brad describes is real, and also not new. He and I have discussed this in the past as well. I’ve spent a lot (the majority maybe) of my career (which began in the 90s) working on projects that were either using, evaluating or making their own common controls.
If you’ve ever developed for a platform like the Mac, or Windows, iOS, Android, you’ll know there’s a system level set of UI components (and much else, the file system primitives, device access APIs).
The Web has long had a simple set of basic components, but when we want to get beyond these (or even style them beyond the typically quite limited range of options we get with CSS) we’re looking at implementing our own from scratch, or, relying on one of dozens of UI frameworks.
In recent months Bad Frost has raised the prospect of a “Global Design System” to solve this problem once and for all.
Here Brian Kardell who has been heavily involved with these sorts of considerations for many years at the W3C and elsewhere considers how we might get there, and the challenges and shortcomings of each approach.
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