Week Notes 5
The week started with the successful deployment of the new Scott's Bass Lessons homepage and navigation refresh. It’s an MVP implementation of the brand new design system that is very much under-construction, behind the scenes.
This has been an interesting challenge for me as I’m slowly rolling out a new design system over the top of an old, one-off design, where the new system will eventually completely replace it. It’s not easy, but it's something I’m very familiar with from my time creating the WriteUpp design system that both rolled out in a similar manner over an old platform, but also powered an iOS/Android app and an online booking system. I love these sort of design system challenges! I just wish the payload of Scott's Bass Lessons was a touch lighter, but it’s something I’m slowly and keenly chipping away at.
Speaking of design systems: this week, the new design system that we’re working on had its official kick-off in London. It was a very productive meeting where all stakeholders and teams from around the project got together to agree on various core issues. I’m happy that the work that we’ve already put into the planning and prototyping of this project helped steer the ship away from some decisions that were pushing teams towards client-only JavaScript rendering. Instead we’re looking at a more progressive enhancement based approach.
I think we can all imagine how many times I uttered the term, "progressive enhancement" or "accessibility" in the meeting (a lot), but it looks like I finally got the message across to some people who weren't quite on board.
Working on design systems is so much more than building components with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Often, a lot of the work—especially with multiple teams—is diplomacy work where the effort is spent suggesting approaches that center around the idea that the design system is a single source of truth that joins the teams together. Without the design system they would likely fragment and create suboptimal, fragmented experiences for the end-users, even though they should be singing off the same song sheet.
A lot of work is left on this project and I’m really enjoying it. I am also excited about hopefully being able to share some of it with you all in the future.
I closed the week agreeing to deliver my "The Power of Progressive Enhancement" talk at the local University’s "WebX" event, where they invite industry folks to come in and deliver talks. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes as the content of my talk is catered more for people that are already in the industry, rather than looking to enter it. It’s certainly a good time to get the students thinking about progressive enhancement, though.
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Hi 👋, I’m Andy — an educator and web designer
I produce front-end development tutorials over at Front-End Challenges Club and Piccalilli. You can sign up for updates on Piccalilli to stay up to date with its progress.