“Design Manager Juli Sombat sheds light on how a need for more cohesion led Spotify’s design systems team to take a cross-platform approach to components.”

“159 variables across 13 modes, totaling 1,843 values” — cheers to the Figma API!

The team at Figma talked to several industry experts from Google’s Material Design team, Spotify, Shopify, and Stripe about how they’re managing the future of design systems — from tooling to automation to accessibility. 

New article and Figma resources from Spotify Design: ​“If we only design for speedy devices, we also risk finding out late in the development process that our feature performs poorly on devices used in emerging markets — and at this point, it can be costly and painful to make significant changes. When designing for a global audience, we have to do better, which is why we developed Performance Context Cards and Performance Action Cards: tools for our teams (and yours) to use during certain stages of the product design process.”

The design team at Spotify discusses balancing conflicting goals of creating a playful space for experimentation and fostering interdisciplinary team collaboration in the Figma files. The key to achieving both is balancing the exploratory nature of design with a logical organization in your shared work. ​“A chaotic mess of brilliant designs is incomprehensible without a helpful file structure but too much structure early on might stifle your team’s inspiration.”

Nice write-up on how Spotify updated their icon system and streamlined the contribution flow with Figma. Shaun Bent shares a few more details in his Twitter thread.

Another example from Spotify. Here, they moved from 36 to 4 track row components.

In this example, they replaced 105 button components with just 3. (Sounds like they’ve been using Variants for a while, as Dylan Field used Spotify design system Encore to present the feature in his Config keynote.)

Backstage is Spotify’s homegrown developer portal. This article shows how to design for it using a combination of Figma and Storybook.

Spotify Design shares how they have shaped Figma to their needs and culture. This post focuses on file structure: ​“Allowing multiple people into the same file doesn’t automatically lead to better collaboration. Our files would need to be organised in a way that is visible and discoverable by everyone. After all, you can’t collaborate on work that you can’t find.” See also: Spotify Ways of Working.