Building on Shifting Ground
Design systems in constrained environments: from establishing principles, to recognising their limits, to building components in code.
Part of: NHS Data Platform Design (2024–2025)
Principles
- 1
Why Design Principles?
March 28, 2025
A few weeks ago, in one of our design systems working group sessions, a colleague asked a question that brought our entire approach into focus. We had been discussing UI patterns, component...
- 2
The Limits of Design Guides
April 4, 2025
When I joined the team, I inherited a design guide. Previous designers had recognised the same problem I described in Why Design Principles?: products built in the vendor's application builder do not...
- 3
Principles as Intervention Lever
April 11, 2025
In Part 1, I described how our design systems working group was stopped by a colleague's observation that we needed to establish fundamental principles before rushing into patterns and components. In...
- 4
Consistency as a Layered Design Principle
April 18, 2025
"Be consistent" seems like uncontroversial design advice. Nielsen's usability heuristics include "consistency and standards" - users "should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or...