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Content: the design system element you forgot

Design and content are interdependent. For a design system that genuinely scales, integrate content.

Kate Kenyon
UX Collective
© Stefan Brüggemann

Why do companies keep showcasing their design systems, only to ignore language as a design element?

This was the question my ex-colleague Jonathon Colman raised this question on LinkedIn.

The answers given by designers ranged from ‘each use case is so contextually specific’ to ‘it’s not because language isn’t important, it’s because design and code are more impactful to a team’s ability to ship product’.

It looks awfully like there is still a design view of content that

  • it doesn’t have any patterns we can scale
  • content = just language, and that’s a nice-to-have that we’ll layer on once the more important stuff is done.

Nope. Neither of these things are true.

Content and design are parallel, intertwined communication systems. They are fundamentally dependent on each other for successful outcomes.

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