Towards a minimal but effective design system
#ramble #design 2024-05-10
Starting with a few observations:
- I usually have limited time to build things
- I care about good design
- I want control over my designs, so templates won’t do
- When I think of building something, I always want the end product to be close to perfect, and I wouldn’t start until I have a clear plan for achieving perfection—all or nothing, in some sense
- This is perhaps counter-productive
Sometimes this just blocks my project, and so hopefully it helps to be in the process of figuring something out.
One issue that comes to mind is just how complicated making a good design can be—all those design systems out there with fancy colour palettes, a whole component library, icon systems, etc. make it overwhelming to think about1.
Or… is it?
As someone who wants good design for websites to display text or photos and occasionally presentation slides or posters, I’m starting to discover that perhaps no complicated design system is needed. There are just a few design aspects that, when put together well, can lead to something I’m pleased with:
- A minimal colour palette
- Fonts
- Spacing
In most cases, playing around with these three things is my entire design process, yet these three things are also surprisingly hard to get right…
Anyway, still trying to figure this out, but hopefully it’ll come with time (T.T.T.)
Of course, there are situations when getting fancy is useful. For now, let’s say that’s a topic for another discussion. ↩︎