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February 4, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #493
This newsletter issue was sent out to 192,036 subscribers on Tuesday, February 4, 2025.
Editorial
The most difficult problems are rarely of a technical nature — they are people problems. It’s everything from collaboration and communication to prioritization and decision-making. And design systems are no exception.
In this newsletter, we want to explore that “human” side of design systems — how to name design tokens, choose priorities, and establish design system flowcharts.
Unsurprisingly, we’ve just announced new online workshops on design systems — and perhaps you’d like to join as well:
- Advanced Design Systems with Brad Frost,
- Design Tokens and UI Component Architecture with Nathan Curtis,
- Design System Planning and Process with Nathan Curtis,
- Theming Design Systems with Samantha Gordashko
You can also get a 5× tickets bundle for your wonderful team, with a friendly best-value-price. Beyond that, we also have some other upcoming events coming up soon:
![Meets Accessibility](https://mcusercontent.com/16b832d9ad4b28edf261f34df/images/3d6f9480-bca8-26cf-358e-98a62b1347ea.png)
- Smashing Meets Accessibility (Feb 20) free!
- Fixing Frustrating Design Patterns For 2025 with Vitaly Friedman (Feb 12) free!
- Smart Interface Design Patterns Live UX Training (Mar 7 – Apr 7) with Vitaly Friedman
And now, let’s dive into the wonderful “human” side of design systems!
— Vitaly
1. Design System Process Flowcharts
A well-adopted and successful design system evolves with the needs of the people who use it. It isn’t a side project or a separate entity but rather a product with its own roadmap, backlog, ownership, and resources. So, how can we refine our existing design system processes to reflect that?
![Design System Process Flowcharts](https://mcusercontent.com/16b832d9ad4b28edf261f34df/images/227ee78c-7bd3-ab86-3f49-a7c56ea0af86.png)
Vitaly collected decision trees and process flowcharts that deliver valuable insights into how the design systems at Nordhealth, GitHub, British Gas, Aviva, Boston Scientific, and other companies handle design system process, maintenance, and contribution. How do they add new features and launch new components? How do they keep their design docs alive? Practical takeaways for your own design system are guaranteed. (cm)
2. Design System Playbooks And Helpers
How to best name design tokens? How to streamline handoff? And how do you get stakeholders to support your design system efforts? To help you strategically approach the challenges that design systems bring along, Romina Kavcic created a collection of useful Figma templates and playbooks.
![Design System Playbooks And Helpers](https://mcusercontent.com/16b832d9ad4b28edf261f34df/images/bdd2deb7-9cf2-fb76-f717-1582a1fd4349.png)
In the collection, you’ll find a Design Tokens Naming Playbook for experimenting with different naming structures, a Strategy Map you can share with stakeholders to get buy-in, and a Design Audit Template and Design Documentation Template to simplify the handoff process and streamline your design documentation.
Romina also prepared a handy Design System Checklist to help you set the right priorities and nail the workflow and a Design System Metrics Collection for an overview of existing metrics and which ones to choose to reflect your objectives best. A powerful toolkit, no matter if you’re completely new to design systems or looking to enhance your skills. (cm)
3. Design Systems Databases
How do other design systems solve a particular UI design challenge? No matter if you’re looking for inspiration on designing an accordion, date picker, progress indicator, or any other component, the Design Systems Database is a wonderful place to start your research.
![Design Systems Database](https://mcusercontent.com/16b832d9ad4b28edf261f34df/images/f0180bf5-84f5-529c-db62-cff625594b81.png)
Created by Ilya Greben, the database organizes and sorts 65 best-in-class design systems by components and directories. You can search for component references, guidelines, and technical documentation from various sections of design systems. Perfect for anyone looking for UI patterns and examples from real-world products.
While we often celebrate the incredible design systems by large brands, much of the impactful design work goes unnoticed. To shine a light on some of the lesser-known design systems, Vitaly compiled design systems from large organizations, governments, and complex systems, ranging from enterprise systems to EdTech, FinTech, healthcare, and B2B.
For more design system inspiration, also be sure to check out the Design Systems Index that Ruben Ferreira Duarte maintains. With more than 300 reference design systems and additional links and tags that can be useful for specific searches, the list is a treasure chest. (cm)
4. Prioritizing Design System Work
Once a design system has gotten well-adopted by designers and engineers, there’s a new challenge that design system teams often face: How to prioritize requests? Alexander Fandén and the design system team at Agoda were in the same situation.
To get to the bottom of it, they developed a prioritization framework that not only helps them prioritize requests but also improves internal coordination and communication with the teams who rely on the design system for their day-to-day work.
![](https://mcusercontent.com/16b832d9ad4b28edf261f34df/images/73f92b43-695c-ac3b-2745-46d1d96ef865.png)
In his article “Prioritizing Design Systems,” Alexander walks you step by step through his team’s approach and shares key learnings and tips to help you get started with a similar process if you’re facing similar challenges. If you plan to set up your own framework and processes, also take a look at the templates and references that the Agoda team prepared to get you started. (cm)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
![Smashing Online Events](https://mcusercontent.com/16b832d9ad4b28edf261f34df/images/6fc06af5-aa9b-c9c1-7f40-9f3cd5af6bc2.png)
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Accessible Typography for Web & UI Design Masterclass design
with Oliver Schöndorfer. Feb 10–18 - UX Design Leadership Masterclass UX
with Paul Boag. Feb 11–20 - Advanced Design Systems Workflow
with Brad Frost. Feb 18–26 - Design Token & UI Component Architecture Workflow
with Nathan Curtis. Feb 20–28 - Deep Dive on Accessibility Testing Dev
with Manuel Matuzović. Feb 26 – March 13 - Smart Interface Design Patterns Live UX Training UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Mar 7 – Apr 7 - Building Modern HTML Emails dev
with Rémi Parmentier. Mar 3–11 - The Secrets of Web Performance dev
with Ryan Townsend. May 7–21 - Jump to all workshops →
6. Naming Tokens In Design Systems
Naming things can be hard, but investing time and effort into implementing an effective token naming system is a crucial step that shouldn’t be rushed when building a design system. Only with a well-thought-out naming system can we ensure that everyone — the design system team, just like the teams working with the system — have a shared understanding of visual style.
![Naming Tokens In Design Systems](https://mcusercontent.com/16b832d9ad4b28edf261f34df/images/b755f347-dd18-282a-cbef-4bc9d1d70e32.png)
Marta Conde created a useful Figma template you can refer to when naming your design system tokens. It compiles all the examples of tokens that Nathan Curtis mentions in his article “Naming Tokens In Design Systems,” plus a Tokens Glossary Template. For the tokens glossary, Marta gathered terminology from well-known design systems that can serve as a starting point for developing your own token naming conventions. (cm)
7. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
![Success At Scale](https://mcusercontent.com/16b832d9ad4b28edf261f34df/images/a0423a44-a396-7b26-c0ca-04716a219187.png)
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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Previous Issues
- Design Systems
- New CSS Features For 2025
- State of AI 2025
- Interface Design
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- Fun And Useful Gems
- Useful Templates And Canvases For Designers
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