What’s new on DesignSystems.com: June roundup | Figma Blog
DesignSystems.com’s June 2019 roundup highlights the growing depth and diversity of design-systems practice. The featured articles cover icon creation, agency collaboration, accessible React architecture, and white-label customization. Together, they show how design systems can support consistency while remaining adaptable to different products, teams, and users. ## Iconography from Creation to Handoff - Bonnie Kate Wolf’s guide explains how to create, organize, and implement icons within a design system. - Topics include: - Strokes and fills - Boolean operations - Icon organization - Preparing assets for developer handoff - The guide is intended for both beginners and experienced icon designers. ## Building Design Systems with Clients - Instrument shares an agency perspective based on work with companies such as Nike, Google, Airbnb, Sonos, and LinkedIn. - The agency emphasizes complete, scalable systems rather than one-off design solutions. - Its process depends on close collaboration with clients to establish a shared understanding of: - What a design system should provide - How reusable components will work - How the system can support multiple applications ## Accessible React Containers - Zendesk’s Garden design system introduced “containers” to share keyboard and accessibility behavior across React components. - These containers: - Render no user interface - Handle keyboard and mouse interactions - Support right-to-left layouts - The new open-source `react-containers` library separates these behaviors from Garden’s styling package. - The containers were rewritten to be smaller, more efficient, and more closely aligned with WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1. ## White-Labeling and User Customization - Dawn Labs developed a system that lets third-party users customize an application while preserving overall consistency. - Its implementation combines: - `styled-components` - `styled-system` - A GraphQL backend - Because users needed more control, the team created a styling escape hatch using global CSS injection and CSS variables. - This approach allows end users to customize the interface without requiring intervention from the original client. The roundup demonstrates that effective design systems must balance structure with flexibility. Teams can use shared standards, accessible component patterns, and controlled customization to create systems that scale across products and audiences.
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