Just as there’s no one way to make a website, there is no one way to make a design system. While there are several “best practices” that have emerged, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for creating a design system. And sometimes, the best solution means going against industry standards.

In this talk, Mina will discuss her experiences building systems at two highly visible, and vastly different, organizations: Hillary for America and Slack. She’ll tell you all the things and all the ways she got it wrong, while somehow making it work.

So you’ve gotten buy-in, you’ve made an inventory of designs and components, and you’ve set up your team’s first design system. What happens next? This talk will explore maintaining a design system, as well as new challenges that arise once your design system matures. Topics that this talk will cover will include: documentation, adoption, support, tooling, and architecture.

Design systems have conceptually been very well documented and discussed, yielding fantastic UX results.

Web engineers have painstakingly audited, researched, and crunched numbers in order to also provide fantastic UX.

Sound familiar?

Performance By Design will explore how Design systems and web performance work in concert to achieve same first class UX result.

A very common question I get, whether at a conference, on a panel or even from people I work with at BuzzFeed, is what my day-to-day work is like as a VP of Design. Since no one week or day is exactly the same, I've historically had trouble answering this question. No more!

In this talk, I’ll detail a full, actual week of being a VP of Design at BuzzFeed, along with some lessons I’ve learned in my role that I have found to apply broadly to leaders across all levels of an organization.

Color is the most relative medium in art. This fact makes working with color in design systems particularly challenging. Few people seem to want to claim to be an expert in color—perhaps because there’s an immensely deep amount to learn, or perhaps it’s because color is one of those things we hate to get wrong. Whatever the reason, color remains a contentious but often critical part of design.

I’ll be sharing my journey into color, from the technical challenges to how people respond to it. We’ll take a look at the efforts required in updating large scale web applications like GitHub, testing the interaction of color with other parts of a design system, creating color naming conventions, color contrast, and color system use outside of the product UI.

Themes and patterns in the design and application of systems for data products, analytic tools, and visualizations.

Throughout history, our tools have affected how we understand the world. In our young industry, our tools, needs, and processes are constantly changing. We build sites and frameworks and components with the tools we have at hand. As we do, we discover problems, invent solutions, and then invent new tools.

Design Systems are our current model of making sense of the intersection of front-end code and design. With the tools we have today, what is our working model of a component? How do we define them, create them, and ensure they work at scale? In this talk we’ll discuss how our tools affect our understanding, create a checklist of factors that make a component a component, and how to implement the theory of components with the tools you have at hand.

The People Layer is the deepest, most complex layer of any organization. It’s a layer of interaction that persists beyond changes in aesthetics, technologies, devices, systems, tools, and trends. Everyone is involved, and everyone can solve for it.

One benefit of design systems is that they help ensure consistency across surfaces, platforms, and projects. The BBC claims that their design system, GEL enables them to “create consistent and delightful user experiences” while Salesforce highlights consistency as one of their four design principles. But what does consistency mean in practice and when can it create conflict in a design system?

In this talk we’ll take a look at the differing types of consistency (internal, external, and real-world) and how they work in digital and physical interfaces, and we’ll go a step further and dive into the myriad reasons that inconsistency can make sense, too. You’ll walk away with a framework for making better trade-offs when deciding for or against consistency.

When we align, we seek positive outcomes for a system whose components may range from people to patterns, beliefs to behaviors, and much more. When we align, we arrive at a shared understanding of priorities, efficiencies, and tradeoffs. When we align, the result is purposeful and even beautiful.

In this keynote, Cameron will discuss three aspects of alignment within systems, not the least of which are design systems, and the remarkable outcomes that are made possible when we align.

I built Susy, a Sass grid system that can generate any grid technique you like — but I haven't used it in years. I'll show you how various grid systems work, and how to avoid using them. For those few cases where a grid really is required, we'll talk about the best ways to roll your own, so you're not relying on a bloated library to make decisions for you. We'll also look at the new layout toys — from flexbox to CSS Grid — and how to get started with only a few lines of code.

When to use floats, CSS Grid, flexbox, custom properties, and other techniques. How to make grid-math simple, and lose the grid-system. How to make grid-systems work for you when you need them.

Debbie Millman is the founder and host of Design Matters, the first and longest running podcast about design. Created in 2004 and launched online in 2005, Design Matters has evolved from a show about designers talking about design to a show about how creative people design their lives.

Millman has interviewed more than 300 design luminaries and cultural commentators, including Massimo Vignelli, Milton Glaser, Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Barbara Kruger, Seth Godin and more. In the 12 years since its inception, the show has garnered over five million downloads per year, was designated a best podcast on iTunes and won a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award.

Design Matters began with an idea and a telephone line. After an offer from the Voice America Business Network to create an online radio show in exchange for a fee, Millman decided that interviewing designers who she revered would be an inventive way to ask her heroes everything she wanted to know about them. She started broadcasting Design Matters live from a telephone modem in her office in the Empire State Building and her life was forever changed.

In this entertaining presentation, Debbie will share the details about the origins of Design Matters, why the show had no logo for a decade, the time David Carson stood her up and how and why Amanda Palmer made her cry.