Comment by hn_throwaway_99
20 hours ago
But every company I worked at in the past 10 years or so eventually coalesced around a singular "design system" managed by one person or a small core team. But that just goes back to my original point - every company had their own design system, and there is not a single, industry-wide set of "rails".
The bigger issue I see with "got to keep lots of designers employed" problem is the series of pointless, trend-following redesigns you'd see all the time. That said, I've seen many design departments get absolutely slaughtered at a lot of web/SaaS companies in the past 3 years. A lot of the issue designers were working on in the web and mobile for the 25 years prior are now essentially "solved problems", and so, except for the integration of AI (where I've seen nearly every company just add a chat box and that AI star icon), it looks like there is a lot less to do.
> But every company I worked at in the past 10 years or so eventually coalesced around a singular "design system" managed by one person or a small core team.
As a designer, the issue I see is that desktop design requires knowledge and experience of the native toolkits.
This makes desktop the hardest platform to design (well) for.
For example, on macOS you need to know about where the customisation points are in NSMenu, you need to know a little about the responder chain etc.
Most designers only have web or mobile experience, and the nuances of the desktop get lost, even at th design stage. You end up with a custom and shallow system that is weird in the context of the OS.
You also end up with stuff like no context menus, weird hover states (hand cursors anyone?), weird font and UI sizing (why are Spotify's UI elements literally twice the size of native controls? The saving grace of it being an Electron app is that I can zoom out 3 steps to make the UI size sane). I digress...