This works for products with a very limited scope that are mostly content focused, with a very small design team so everyone can agree to use the very limited toolkit in standards.html. The approach of saying “All ui shall only use these 29 components, anything else is forbidden” is not going to fly in a company with 10s of designers and 100s of engineers.
We tried this style at Airbnb and it turns out forcing all UI changes - from either designers or engineers - to acquire a single exclusive lock on standards.html leads to a fuckton of contention and frustration, and soon people are just going to yolo their own thing totally ignoring the pristine blessed system because the system doesn’t work.
The art of design systems isn’t a single technical approach - it’s finding an optimal workflow so your design engineers can build a UI toolkit that your product teams will actually adopt and contribute to, within the constraints of your existing tech stack & organization.
We tried this style at Airbnb and it turns out forcing all UI changes - from either designers or engineers - to acquire a single exclusive lock on standards.html leads to a fuckton of contention and frustration, and soon people are just going to yolo their own thing totally ignoring the pristine blessed system because the system doesn’t work.
The art of design systems isn’t a single technical approach - it’s finding an optimal workflow so your design engineers can build a UI toolkit that your product teams will actually adopt and contribute to, within the constraints of your existing tech stack & organization.