When Design Systems became A Thing with Jina Anne — #02

📲 Text the show your thoughts!

Jina Anne gives us a history of the journey from early style guides to widespread industry adoption of design systems, and the challenges and successes. We explore how tokens came to be, how it feels when the engineering team just starts using your work before it's ready, the separation of HTML/CSS/JS concerns, and how ClarityConf got started. Plus, the origin of the phrase "design systems" (maybe?), and  what the NASA Graphic Standards Manual has to do with ClarityConf.

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Links & References

• Jina Anne
• ClarityConf
• The Design Systems Slack
• Quark
• Salesforce Theo for design tokens
• Old-school CSS tools Sass, Less, and Stylus
• CSS Custom Properties (variables)
• Adam Morris and Tachyons
• Salesforce Lightning Design System
• Nicole Sullivan and Mark Otto at The Mixin meetup
• Richard Danne, Designing for Earthlings and Astronauts at ClarityConf 2016
• The original 1976 NASA Graphic Standards Manual
• Gartner Hype Cycle for UX 2024
• Penpot (Figma alt)
• Josh Silverman at CCA
• Ben Callahan's The Question

🎨🎟️ Into Design Systems is May 25-28
Get your ticket at intodesignsystems.com/ontheme

Into Design Systems is back with their annual virtual conference, May 28-30, 2025. Get your ticket now for three days of practical, hands on sessions showing the what, why, and how of design systems. This year, the conference is focused on developer handoff, accessibility, multi brand theming, and governance. You'll get hands on knowledge you can put to use at work immediately, files and resources to take away, and hear from very well known industry speakers.