Creating websites and products that are accessible to all is essential for enhancing the user experience.

Morgane and Chris discuss the idea that many design systems pitch themselves as a technical asset. However, design systems can extend past this notion to offer business value, patterns and ROI.

Evan and Chris discuss source of truth and how it is linked most importantly to overall user experience opposed to just design or code.

Streamlined Token Naming, Instant Imports, and Polished UI

These are our biggest takeaways and common themes from our conversations on design system technical architecture - and from our experience seeing how decisions play out over years.

We’ve organized our perspective into a few key areas we see as critical to building a sustainable and scalable workflow around design tokens.

New year, new features.

We surveyed over 100 design system managers and contributors to better understand the challenges they’re facing around adoption. Here are 5 of the top insights that the survey revealed.

Evan Lovely (Head of Product & Engineering), Chris Bloom (Principal Front-End Engineer), Jake Love (Senior Solutions Engineer), and Brittany Smart (Solutions Engineer) join Chris to discuss the state of design systems today. Listen to hot takes on everything from the lesser known elements of successful design systems to the role vulnerability should play in your system.

Join CEO and co-founder, Chris Strahl, for an in-depth overview of Knapsack's enterprise-grade design system platform.

Stephen Gates and Chris discuss the realities of design system leadership, unconventional sources of inspiration, and the impact of design on society.

Knapsack’s Senior Solutions Engineer Jake Love joins us for a 30-minute conversation that will give teams more insight into the role design tokens play in a successful design system. Gain an understanding of exactly what design tokens are (and aren’t), ways designers and developers can use tokens in their everyday workflows, and how Knapsack’s token engine helps teams work more efficiently.

Vojtech Miksu (Software Engineer at Uber) and Evan Lovely (Chief Architect at Knapsack) join Chris to discuss the gap between a frontend developer’s code base and what actually gets shipped, the next-gen tool (Ladle) Vojtech created to address this, and ultimately helping developers get closer to what end users experience.

June's product updates streamline the editing and publishing workflow in Knapsack. We've added a new approval step for Editors, implemented auto-commit for Admin users, introduced a page visibility toggle, and earned our SOC 2 Type 2 certification. Dig in to the details and see what's changed.

To get maximum value from your design system, designers and developers need to work together to use it well. While the code side of things might sound intimidating (or boring) to designers, a basic understanding of how developers use your design system can improve collaboration and make teams more effective. Watch the 30 minute webinar now to learn more.

May's product updates are focused on providing a faster path to setting up your design system. We've introduced SSO, added new integrations with GitLab and Bitbucket, improved documentation workflows and so much more. See what's changing here at Knapsack.

Meghan Rosatelli and Saejin Choi join Chris to discuss transitioning multiple design systems into one, shifting system consumers’ mindset from working with a local system to working with a global system, and using play to drive excitement and adoption of a design system.

Nick, Ellis, and Chris discuss how News UK’s design system, NewsKit, united multiple disparate brands in a central source of truth, and how infrastructure management has helped scale design and engineering practices.

Our recent product updates are all about flexibility and customization, helping you build a design system that embodies your company’s design philosophy.

Curious about the fun parts of design systems? Check out this episode of the Design Systems Podcast featuring Davy Fung, co-host of design systems podcast Design System Office Hours, who joined Chris to talk about working creatively within design system constraints, common structures for design systems, and building a Jedi Council of Design System Advocates.

Systems thinking can change the way you build digital experiences. How? Read on.

For a system to be adopted at scale, the design system team has to operate like a service, where backstage activities are coordinated and choreographed to enable a desired onstage experience. Xiangjun (Shixie) Shi Trofimov, Design Lead of Carbon for IBM.com design system, shares her experience on a service-oriented design system team.

Una, Chris Bloom, and Chris Strahl talk about production-level code, the accessibility of Web3, and the new sliced bread of the web. Prepare for Una to blow your mind with how dynamic CSS can be.

Mark your calendars for June 6-9. We’re hosting 50 product, engineering, and design leaders for three days of learning, sharing, and design systems. Here’s why you should join us.

Corey and Chris discuss how design systems represent an organization’s lifeblood, the sisyphean parts of design system maintenance, and what stands out about design system culture at Compass.

Matt, Veda, and Chris discuss how Matt and Veda have incorporated accessibility and inclusion into one of the world’s most well-known design systems, Spectrum. Matt shares his experience getting accessibility principles into Spectrum on the ground floor, and Veda discusses how inclusion fits into design systems.

February's product updates will keep your product team in sync—this I promise you.

Wayfair, the ubiquitous online retailer, is more than just wayfair.com: the company owns Perigold, Joss & Main, and Birch Lane. Neva, Rogin, and Chris discuss how Wayfair united three disparate design systems into one; the gradual process of building a holistic design system team; achieving cross-functional design system adoption, and the merits of overthinking.

Design systems aren't just for designers; code isn't just for engineers. The future of design systems is collaborative.

Mike and Chris discuss design systems at the enterprise level, the history of systems, and UX design at the beginning of the internet.

Design systems help new hires get up-to-speed fast—but how? This guide will walk you through getting new designers onboarded to your design system within days.

Building a new design system isn’t as impossible as it seems. Whether you’re starting fresh or starting over (or even just making big changes), we have three easy-to-implement practices that will help you start delivering value in weeks, instead of months or years.

We're ready for innovation. Here are some predictions from the design systems community about what 2022 will bring.

I don’t need to tell you that it has been a year. We’ve got some cool things and big news lined up for 2022, but we’ve been putting in work over the last month of 2021 too. Before most of the working world heads out for a well-deserved holiday break, we want to share updates to the Knapsack platform that make design system management an easier, more pleasant experience.

Prepping your 2022 hiring budget? Keep these roles in mind for your design system team. Not sold on building a team for your design system? We've laid out the reasons why you should.

Join Andrew Rohman (Head of Customer Success at Knapsack) and Mike Bowser (Design Director, Systems at Vista) for a conversation about the importance and impact of unifying cross-functional teams in your system and digital production workflows.

Want to supercharge your design system? Learn what people practices you need to nail down.

Join Andrew Rohman (Head of Customer Success at Knapsack), Susie Dirks (Head of Product at Knapsack), and Tommy Kuntze (Head of Research & Design at Rhumbix) for a conversation about the keys to getting to value quickly with your design system effort.

Stephen Gates joined Chris Strahl on the podcast for a long talk about team culture, design systems, and more.

Design systems should serve your entire product team. That's why Knapsack has removed boundaries keeping non-engineers from being full contributors and made your design system accessible to everyone who needs it.

Design systems don't just contain design elements: they're a central source of truth for product teams and ideally hold all of a product's assets, including content. Jess Sattell, Senior Content Strategist for Adobe's Spectrum design system, shares her experiences and thoughts on writing for design systems.

Microsoft’s Josh Cusick and Chris discuss how to convey intent when working with a design system, the importance of buy-in for a successful design system culture, and whether or not your design system will ever be finished.

If you want to learn about design systems, there’s an endless list of resources at your disposal. This garden of resources, however, has a downside: uncertain quality. As a senior practitioner, you can’t risk trusting the wrong sources. That’s why we’ve put together a collection of resources vetted by design system experts.

By figuring out why design systems are so beneficial for product teams, we can get more value from them, faster.

What’s the difference between a design system and a pattern library? They serve different purposes.

Design tokens are a critical part of your design system's functionality.

Maya Hampton, Product Manager of REI's design system Cedar, wrote a follow-up to her episode of the Design Systems Podcast. Read on to discover what the product manager of a leading design system does and how she makes an impact.

Leonardo De La Rocha and Chris discuss the “federated” design system model, how to connect design systems to business needs, designing friction-free cross-platform experiences, and C-suite awareness of design needs.

Maya Hampton, product manager of REI's design system, joined Knapsack CEO Chris Strahl to discuss why design systems need to be flexible, the role of a product manager in a design system, and viewing design systems as products.

Form design isn’t a nice-to-have; they come up often and are carefully curated to get the right information at the right time. But when forms involve players from multiple teams, priorities can get mixed up and inclusion can fall to the wayside.

Audrey and Chris discuss the vision guiding Xero’s design system team, how co-ownership helps design system teams thrive, the processes she uses for managing a global team, and how the Xero design system team approaches modernization.

Jess Clark and Chris discuss the meaning of design systems and the potential of design systems as a service. What can design systems offer us beyond infrastructure? How can approaching design systems as products, rather than repositories, increase their capabilities?

Accessible design and design systems are both more than just good design practice—they're good business. How can we build design systems that support accessible design practices?

This episode is a little bit longer—okay, a lot longer—than our usual. Chrome developer advocate Adam Argyle and Chris Strahl talk about tokens in all their glory without worrying about time limits. If you’ve ever wondered about the limits of tokens and what’s left to explore in the token stratosphere, check out this transcript.

Design systems and pattern-based design are accessibility's best friends. By setting accessibility standards early, you can ensure products that meet high accessibility standards all the time.

Writing accessible documentation makes design systems easier to use, manage, and scale. Committing to writing accessible documentation isn’t just good practice; it’s good business. Read on to understand why accessible documentation is important for your design system and how it will benefit your workflow.

Design thinking was revolutionary—but it's not perfect. Pattern-based thinking is the solution.

Knapsack's new Figma integration turns your color styles to design tokens—in code. Learn how our plugin will make designer-dev collaboration easy.

We spoke to experts from some of the world's most advanced design systems about design tokens: best practices, potential advances, and their importance to the design systems community. Our findings are packaged in a downloadable report.

In episode 30 of the Design Systems Podcast, Jehad Affoneh, Scott Mathis, and Chris discuss the advantages of open-source, the role of content in design systems, the pattern-based approach to building apps, and similarities between music and tokens.

Version control is a well-known best practice for developers; now we're welcoming it to design systems. Here's how to keep your design system impactful and up-to-date using version control.

Tl;dr: “By 2025, over half of all new digital products globally will be traceable to a platform-based or open-source design system.” Get on board.

To get the most out of a design system, we need to make sure it's built to last. Utilizing pattern-based thinking is key to creating a reusable, impactful design system.

Design systems should be your organization's central source of truth for all brand elements—including voice and tone.

Knapsack’s mission is to change the way people think about digital products while being excellent humans along the way. As part of that mission, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Knapsack’s design system publication.