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Discussion on: We're the core maintainers of Storybook, Ask Us Anything!

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danielduan profile image
Daniel Duan • Edited

"Frontend is easy"

Frontend interfaces have gotten more and more complex and so has the need for systems and architecture within the frontend. Many companies have large teams of 50+ people working on a single frontend system and that creates a lot of communication, management, and architectural challenges. This means that frontend developers on larger projects focus on very specific issues like build systems and webpack, performance, tooling, etc.

One thing that came out of this focus is a recent trend of companies discussing "Design Systems" and creating custom tooling around the shared Design <-> Engineering standards as a single source of truth. What a component is to an engineer may be totally different from what a designer thinks it is. In Sketch, it is easy to drag and drop a component, place it inside another component, and imagine that it works. But on the engineering side, these seemingly small changes can create lots of unnecessary work that can be prevented if the designer understands the engineering constraints. Communicating those constraints is hard.

I don't know what form of tooling or communication framework this will ultimately look like. Airbnb is working on importing React components into Sketch and creating drag and drop compilers to generate components on different platforms. InVision is creating a tool for designers to create branding and style guides with individual components. There are some pretty exciting developments in this area.

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norbertdelangen profile image
Norbert de Langen

Great answer!