Why the need for a Design System

From the early days at Blockstack, we determined it would be amazing to have one “Framework,” one “system,” where anyone can come into the project, build a component and magically push the component out and have that component just work and the design/layout would be complete.

Awesome, right!? Well not entirely doable as one can imagine. It would take serious time building out and thinking about every layout option available or you you could just use a generic framework. Ah-ha! Now we’re on to something.

So we thought, what if we just took good old Bootstrap, something we are familiar with and have contributed to in the past and used that. Well it works. Sort-of. What we discovered was in by using a generic framework one ends up designing, laying out components, well, just like “Bootstrap” would and therefore executing a “Bootstrap” design. We have witnessed this with the Material Design fad which produced a ton of “Material Design” looking websites and products as they were utilizing this hot shiny new framework of the week.

Fast forward to today and a few major lessons learned… much like others in the space (video - 5m49s) we’re making a big mistake in trying to use someone’s solution for our design problems. We discovered that utilizing a framework created for a ‘one size fits all’ solution is highly problematic.

We have unique needs;

  • we’re a platform
  • we have a unique demographic

This post is copied and pasted from an old GitHub issue here

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