Building a Visual Language: Behind the scenes of our Airbnb design system by Karri Saarinen Airbnb Design

airbnb design system

At the end of the day, the real source-of-truth of your design system is the code you write. Learn how Uber, Pinterest, Shopify, and Airbnb are leveraging components to build a consistent UI/UX design system. 7- The main benefit of documenting your symbols is that it helps developers access the documentation while working on the spec mode. Down below you will get all the important information like snippets from the design system.

Why design is key to Airbnb's incredible success

We’re constantly adding to DLS, changing existing components and optimizing it to make it usable by everyone in the world. Bring real data to your designs — including traditional APIs and GraphQL endpoints. If you’re a designer or an engineer familiar with React, you should feel right at home with the new library, and you can play with it right now. For example, a certain component (nav-bar, item etc) could have a relative size or margin compared the rest of the application. In different instances these variables might change, so it’s ok to leave some room to play. As a developer, and they will say it’s a component library on GitHub, written in React, Vue, Angular or just JavaScript.

airbnb design system

How do you apply those two principles in practice?

By pushing past the default human identity, we naturally need our team to reflect our external image. Software design has unfortunately not evolved at a similar pace. Design teams can often struggle to reach a cadence that balances the creative process and cycles of continuous innovation. Quality suffers, the experience becomes less cohesive, and talented people spend an inordinate amount of time simply managing communication across disciplines. Each week, we’d ask our partners if they had feedback to improve the meetings.

Written by Weave Media Team

We couldn’t find a limited character copy generator, so we created our own tool to produce words. They guided us through each stage—discovery, ideation, and refinement—while working closely with and collecting feedback from both brand and product leadership. It was apparent early on that a balance of functionality and brand expression was necessary, and this influenced the decisions we made throughout the process. We briefly considered system typefaces that are optimized for screens, but found there wasn’t an option that could provide a unique and consistent voice across our mediums and platforms.

By committing to learn from each other and measure progress together, we’re able to provide a better experience for our teams, and for the entire Airbnb community. Partnership with designers was key, but getting buy-in from managers would make or break the program. We wanted to shift the collaboration mentality from nice-to-have to necessity.

InVision's New Tool Lets Big Teams Manage Sprawling Design Systems - Fast Company

InVision's New Tool Lets Big Teams Manage Sprawling Design Systems.

Posted: Wed, 25 Oct 2017 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Here are 23 popular React UI libraries you can use out of the box, in case you choose this option. If you implement your own library, remember to leave enough design room for developers to play, without breaking the rules. My goal is to move the needle of representation in tech, but it’s not a responsibility I or Airbnb can carry alone. The tech community must consider the fabric of who makes up their companies, and how that identity is presented to the world. A solution that many land on is a kind of homage—a metaphor for diversity through rainbow-colored figures.

Look for lamps that have USB ports in their base

The depictions of visual disabilities are relatively direct, such as a prosthetic limb. Diversity of age, race, disability, religion, orientation, and gender are the foundation of who we are. We need to reflect belonging anywhere, and my role was a clear opportunity to celebrate diverse identities.

Kim also scrolled through the component codebase, which featured 30+ props in its public interface, each prop having in its configuration complexity. The ability to customize components was thus creating implementation, documentation, usage and maintainability challenges. The design system also adopted a modular architecture (as favored by React) and a base + variant pattern. The base + variant pattern consisted in isolating the core parts of a component that are not subject to change from the parts that are open to customization. This translated in a component file implementing the core behavior, structure and appearance of a component (like accessibility or default styling). The base component could later be extended for customization purposes, for example modifying the appearance of the base component.

airbnb design system

The goal with this “masters” folder is to safeguard against someone altering the files. It’s built into my workflow so when I deliver a new template of components, I also include the same file in the “master” folder. Not only does it help with version control, but it allows a quick way to fix any issues with your delivered file. It’s a platform where users can make informed decisions based on feedback from others. This transparency builds trust and makes the decision-making process easier for users. By addressing what the users need and how they feel, Airbnb has made a platform that’s not just visually pleasing but practical and user-friendly.

Typography doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it’s rooted in the culture and tradition of a given language. It’s not invented from thin air, it’s a continuation of existing traditions. All typography we see today is a product of lineage that started with movable type and Gutenberg. This case study is part of a launch series, and details the technical process story. Learn more about how we designed a distinguishable typeface that combines character, function, and scale here. Staff Software Engineer Daniel O'Connor peels back the layers of the home service platform's design system, Thumbprint, to show how they built it for flexibility and efficiency.

Our mission is to connect people across cultures and continents, so our illustrations have to reflect the community we’re bringing together. We can’t generalize or curate based on what’s considered most “commercially acceptable”. Humans are humans, so we don’t try to design our way around the simple fact that we’re all different. 4- If you want to add textiles, you can do that by choosing an element and then clicking on add textiles. Now choose a symbol on the canvas and include that in the library.

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