Design Systems
Systems published in the open for anyone to read, several of them built by governments, which have no reason to hide rules paid for with public money and therefore write down the reasoning too.
Dictionary entry
- Carbon 2016– / Style
IBM's openly published and maintained design system, the working form of the IBM Design Language. Its skeleton is the 2x Grid, where an eight pixel mini unit is halved or doubled to size everything, the IBM Plex typeface, and a color model that stacks neutral grays as layers with one core blue reserved for action.
- GOV.UK Design System 2012– / Style
The design language the UK government's Government Digital Service publishes and maintains for public services. Everything runs in one undecorated left aligned column set in GDS Transport, and the green button keeps square corners while carrying a darker green band along its bottom edge, dropping by exactly that depth when pressed. Whatever holds keyboard focus turns yellow with a black rule under it.
- U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) 2015– / Style
The design language of United States federal websites, published by the General Services Administration. Color, spacing, and type size are quantized into a limited set of discrete options instead of the open range CSS allows, and the system ships Public Sans, a neutral face drawn from Libre Franklin, so that every agency site speaks in the same voice.