Comment by Michael Xander on "I am Harry Roberts. Ask me anything."

Thanks!

I'm wondering, what's your take on creating and especially maintaining a style guide?

I’m absolutely all for it!

I had this exact discussion with a client today. Most (if not all, I imagine) of the styleguides that are actually successful have their own backing and funding from the business—they’re run as their own product.

Unfortunately, for most companies, this is unlikely to happen. This means the styleguide is maintained in spare time, or alongside product work, or isn’t maintained at all. What happens then is the exercise looks (on paper, at least) like a failure. This is really disheartening, but understandable.

So for a styleguide to really shine, it has to be treated as its own product/project. Or, at the very least, all design work should be carried out styleguide-first[1]. That is to say, we don’t build a new component for X page; we build a new component for the styleguide and then deploy it to X page.

Any thoughts on deeper design systems like Rizzo from Lonely Planet, who kinda works as an API for production and their style guide?

Things like Rizzo[2] and Origami[3] are great, and were built by some very clever people indeed. The API-style of deliver really helps to keep things in sync, whilst also dogfooding your work. But, again, there’s an entire team dedicated to maintaining Origami, which I would argue is a large part of its success. Same with the other forerunner, Salesforce’s Lightning Design System[4].

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