Nathan Curtis has been swimming in the deep end of the UX pool since 1996, when he started focusing his creative energies on IA, ID, usability, and front-end development. Nathan authored Modular Web Design and has presented and led daylong workshops for years on the topics of design systems, component and pattern libraries, sketching, and design communications.
A design system is made up of parts: visual style, UI components, code, editorial, and often more. We know how to design, build, deliver them is like any other digital product development process. And there’s the rub: your system is a product in and of itself, applied to an enterprise’s ecosystem of other products built by autonomous teams of designers and developers.