Design System Manager

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Design System Manager

Introducing the Design System Manager Doc

This Doc serves as a comprehensive resource for all practices for a Design System initiative, not just design and engineering. It ensures cohesion across all products, aligning patterns, components, styles and assets.

If you've arrived here from the

Coda Figma Plus Pack⁠

, you can connect your Figma account within the

Key Integrations⁠

section. This seamless integration paves the way for a more efficient design process, boosting productivity across all practices. With the Coda Figma Pack, you don't have to worry about updating tables with thousands of components and styles. It's a scalable solution designed to grow with you, streamlining your workflow and boosting your team productivity.

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Producthunt⁠

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Key Value Propositions

Enhanced Design Documentation: Leveraging Coda's robust documentation features within Figma, Storybook and Jira, this Doc boosts the process of creating and maintaining design documentation. You can keep all your components and styles in sync in Coda and track component information effortlessly, ensuring your design system is consistently documented and easily understandable.

AI-Powered Insights (currently in Alpha): Experience the power of AI within your Coda workspace. This Doc brings Coda.io's AI capabilities to your fingertips, offering insights that can shape your design decisions. You can utilize the AI for documentation, simplifying text, providing detailed explanations, improving documentation language, text translations, summarizing content, and synthesizing data like release updates and design consistency checks. Additionally, you can set up code generation through building blocks, making your design process even more efficient.

Improved Collaboration: Empower your team with enhanced real-time collaboration. This template allows for real-time updates within Figma using Coda's features, including free editors, suggested edits, and comments. Moreover, unlike Storybook, you can edit documentation without any coding knowledge, making the collaboration process seamless and inclusive for all team members.

Data-Inspired Approach: This Doc enables a more data-inspired design practice by incorporating data from Coda into your Design System. You can view detailed Design System documentation analytics in Coda, giving you the insights needed to make informed design decisions and create designs that truly resonate with your audience. More on that here:

https://coda.io/mystats⁠

⁠

Streamlined Workflow: With this Doc, you can work within Figma while accessing the powerful capabilities of Coda.io, making your workflow more efficient and reducing the need to switch between different tools. The integration offers connections with Jira and over

600 other packs⁠

. You can also integrate with analytics tools and create an API for your Design System with

Coda API⁠

and

Webhooks⁠

, ensuring your workflow is as smooth as possible.

Why Choose Coda? The Unique Selling Proposition

Coda brings two key benefits that make it a unique proposition for design system documentation:

Fostering Collaboration Through a Federated Governance Model: In an effort to shift from a centralized to a federated governance model, it's crucial to have a platform where everyone can contribute by adding new content,

suggesting edits⁠

, or

providing comments⁠

. Traditional tools can make this challenging due to their pricing scalability constraints. However, with Coda, every editor is free. This means you can invite virtually everyone to your design system document, customize visibility and editing access for specific pages, and encourage more contribution. A good example of this is inviting product teams to contribute to patterns that they use across their products.

Versatile Documentation Tool, Not Design or Engineering Specific: Unlike tools that are focused on design-only documentation or engineering-only documentation (like Storybook), Coda caters to a broader audience. This inclusivity ensures that contributors don't need to be proficient in Figma, GitHub, or any other specialized tool to contribute to the design system. Coda is an exceptional editing tool that empowers users to document things, create formulas, automate workflows, and generate charts from data. It breaks down barriers and makes contributing to the design system accessible to all.

In short, the unique selling proposition of Coda lies in its ability to democratize design system documentation and make it an inclusive, collaborative process. With Coda, everyone has a voice, and every voice can shape the design system ❤️

Key Integrations

⁠
`Figma.com`⁠
for Design Library

Figma is a collaborative interface design tool used by designers worldwide. Its components and styles allow for reusability, making it a key pillar for design systems. This Doc leverages the power of Figma to provide a unified and efficient design workflow.

The full potential of this Design System Manager Doc in Coda can be unlocked by using two Figma Packs:

⁠

Farid Sabitov's Figma Plus Pack⁠

: This pack is more focused on the components and styles of your design system, allowing you to keep your data in sync

⁠

Coda's Figma Pack⁠

: This pack pulls generic information about your Figma files, providing a broad overview and control over your design system.

To begin unlocking these features, go to

Figma⁠

page to connect your Figma account 🌟

⁠
`Storybook.js.org`⁠
for Code Library

Storybook is a powerful open-source tool for developing UI components in isolation. It's widely used by engineers to maintain the Code library of components. Design System Manager Doc in Coda helps to facilitate integration with Storybook, by linking your design components in Figma with your engineering components in Storybook or Chromatic. This integration can provide a clear view of how many design components are associated with engineering code components, thereby enhancing the collaboration between design and engineering teams.

To begin unlocking these features, go to

Storybook⁠

page to start 🌟

Jira for Design System Coordination

As an essential project management tool, JIRA plays a critical role in coordinating design system updates. The power of JIRA lies in its ability to organize and track all the tasks, bugs, enhancements, and epic-level issues related to your design system. When integrated with this Design System Manager Doc in Coda, it allows for seamless synchronization of all JIRA tickets, providing a comprehensive view of your design system's progress.

Jira⁠

page to set up an integration 🌟

Key Areas

Design systems are complex and often encompass numerous focus areas. In this Design System Manager Doc, we focus on four main pillars that are crucial for building and managing a robust design system: Patterns, Components, Styles, and Assets. While there are other key areas you might want to include, inspired by other design systems, these four pillars form the foundation of our approach.

⁠
`Patterns`⁠

This is where product, design and engineering come together to identify, align, and document experience patterns across products. These patterns can include how we inform our customers of new features, how we display errors to the user, and other experience patterns. This pillar acts as a bridge between product and user, ensuring consistency and coherence in the user experience.

I will provide a more detailed update on this as part of the requirements database related to patterns. If you're interested, feel free to reach out to me on

LinkedIn⁠

. I'd be delighted to share more details.

⁠

Patterns⁠

⁠
`Components`⁠

Central to any Design System, components are reusable building blocks of your user interfaces. By maintaining a comprehensive table within Coda that links design, engineering, and Jira tickets, you can provide a holistic view of each design system component. This promotes collaboration and ensures that all aspects of a component are documented in a single, accessible location.

What makes Coda a unique and powerful tool for this is that all editors are free. This feature empowers everyone on the team to contribute to the design system documentation, whether that's by adding new content,

suggesting edits⁠

, or

providing comments⁠

. In this way, Coda not only helps maintain the integrity of your design system but also fosters a collaborative environment where everyone is encouraged to contribute.

⁠

Components⁠

⁠
`Styles`⁠
(Design Tokens)

Styles, also known as design tokens, represent the visual elements that define your brand, such as colors, typography, and spacing, etc. This design system manager template in Coda provides a unified table that can link all Figma styles (via API) and Code styles in one place.

If your design system supports multiple platforms, you can also incorporate that level of abstraction within Coda. Leveraging

Coda's AI⁠

capabilities (currently in alpha), you can generate code as part of your design tokens.

Alternatively, you can use the

Coda API⁠

to pull all this information as a JSON file, which can then be incorporated into your style dictionary to create design tokens for different platforms. This integration allows for a seamless transition from design to code, ensuring consistency across all your products.

⁠

Styles⁠

⁠
`Assets`⁠
⁠

Assets in a design system go beyond just icons or media files stored in the design system. They encompass a broader range of elements that form part of your Digital Asset Management (DAM) system and require close collaboration with marketing teams.

In this Coda Design System Manager template, you can create a comprehensive table of all assets, and using the 'Image URL' column option, you can visualize each asset directly in Coda.

For efficient management and future automation of asset management flows, it's recommended to separate assets and components into different files within your design library. This approach will simplify your asset management process, making it easier to update and maintain.

⁠

Assets⁠