When Design Systems became A Thing with Jina Anne

🎧 listen to Episode #2 with Jina Anne on how design systems went mainstream, and don’t forget to text the show with your thoughts!

Read on for a peek into the episode.

In our first episode, Brad and I took a memory lane trip to the 2013 era and talked about the dev tools that made connecting design patterns to code possible. Today, in episode #02, Jina Anne takes us back to when “design systems” became A Thing.

In this episode, Jina gives us a history of the journey from early style guides to widespread industry adoption of design systems, and the challenges and successes that came after. 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 (check out the links in the show notes!), and of course, Jina’s 🌶️ Spicy Take.

🎧 When Design Systems became A Thing with Jina Anne, Episode #02 (55min)

Elyse: 

So, thinking back to that time, what were the changes that you started to pick up that made you feel like, oh, this is going kind of, mainstream? … I think that there was a lot of movement in 2017, 2018, 2019. I feel like suddenly companies were like, we need a design system. We need to hire a design system team. And it feels like it happened really fast. what were you picking up on then that was making you go, oh man, this is a thing.

Jina:

There were a couple of different things. First of all, watching the Slack blow up from like 12 people to thousands of people in a very short time span was wild. So there's that one indicator.

But then also, you were just seeing so many people starting to put their [design system] public. That used to be something not too many companies would want to do ,because they're always worried about proprietary, confidential, [IP], but I think it started to become popular to do that. So it felt like almost every day somebody was launching a new one. And it was really, really cool to see that.

And then also just the number of design systems tools as a product that were starting to come out. I think a lot of us were custom building stuff because none of this stuff really existed. And now it was like, oh, now you've got this tool or that tool or that tool. Storybook, Knapsack, Zeroheight, All of that.

Elyse:

Yeah, and I mean, those are kind of the winners, those are the big ones but there were all kinds of smaller tools. There's so many. First it was Sketch, Invision was really big, and Figma came out, and I think you're right, the way that we created and grew tools for ourselves was a flywheel for also being able to do the thing. It became easier to do the thing, it became faster to do the thing. Once we got to another little kink, we were like, oh, let's build another kind of tool, and those things were growing and there really was an audience for it, and it was really cool to see just, how fast that was. I mean, I think it was like, five years.

Jina: 

Yeah, it was really fast. I really wish I had a time machine sometimes, I think it was like 2012 ish, I was actually pitching the idea of a style guide product to somebody, it was basically a tool that would help make it easy to document and organize, you know, your styles and all that stuff, and the devs I was talking to said it was too niche, and it wouldn't sell. And so we didn't do it. And now I see all these like million and billion dollar companies, and I'm just like, damn, we would have been early.

 
🎨🎟️ 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. Get your ticket and support the podcast by supporting our generous sponsor!

💖 On Theme is a brand new podcast, so if you like what you're hearing, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and share the show with someone! I love hearing your thoughts and questions, so to text the show or message me on LinkedIn and let me know what you think!

See you next episode!,

Elyse