Monthly Design call · April

Present: Jupa (Decidim product team), Carol (Decidim product team), Lucien (Octree)

Agenda items

• Design system (Jupa)

  • https://www.figma.com/design/uw5rRtkrkHpKFS2ZhFQVyN/Design-system--%F0%9F%9A%A7?node-id=29940-25037&p=f&t=WdfOznGkkwVMFgN8-0(External link)

  • Currently, the design system is standardizing it's terminology holistically across the Figma Design System, The Style Guide, and the Code naming conventions for UI components

  • The standardization of Buttons is almost finished, next the standardization of the typographic scale will be a priority

  • Standardization best practices were discussed, in order to onboard new designers within the Decidim Community easily. Not all design systems are good examples of logical sets of terminologies. One standardized reference which is well documented is (unfortunately) Material Design(External link) (no harm in stealing from the rich right?)

• First feedbacks on penpot (Lucien)

  • In short: We do not recommend (yet) to transfer a project like Decidim and it’s design system for the following reasons:

    • We still need to run tests to understand exactly how Penpot handles design systems, especially concerning the components, their instances, and the libraries

    • We still need to estimate the effort of migrating to Penpot. For now alot of manual works seems to be required. Our rough, minimum estimate as of now is of 5 days full time to migrate a project like Decidim, for an experienced UX designer famillair with Penpot.

  • However, Penpot seems more and more promising as a FLOSS for UX. The transition seems to be a question of when, how and who does the work.

  • Pros & cons

    • Con: No automatic import from Figma (yet)

    • Info: Manual export-import of Figma tokens as JSON to Penpot tokens possible, but cumbersome, using figma plugins and manual correction of JSON’s. We successfully migrated our tailwind tokens in about ~45 minutes. (with manual JSON edits, using find and replace to correct JSON syntax)

    • Pro: Mathematical operations on Design Tokens

    • Pro: Penpot draws also on Sketch: i.e margin & paddings for web Still to clarify

  • Further tests Octree will conduct

    • Probably cannot import Components, need to recreate everything (~1 week of work at least)

    • Penpot tokens: is there no strict binding between tokens and instances?

    • How do libraries work?

    • Penpot sets and themes: themes of token sets, we need to better understand this different logic (but seems powerful)