Design Patterns Are A Better Way To Collaborate On Your Design System — Smashing Magazine

True collaboration to create or maintain a design system is really important to making superb product design, but working with other humans is always tricky. The collaborative nature of a design system can have a lot of pitfalls. In its best form, it is the product of close alignment between developers and designers, but it doesn’t always happen that way.

Some painful memories:

• A brilliant designer I worked with made a gorgeous new set of elements and examples for the company to use, but the other designers in the company ran into many situations where it was more expedient to just copy and remake (i.e., detach) the component. The design system was used less and less since contributing to it was always a lower priority than working on a product opportunity.
• A developer I worked with built the design system components such that the padding in every text input, button, and so on always had to be the same in every layout, leading to awkward results when (for example) a button included double-byte characters, only icons, or just longer labels.
• I did a lot of work on variations of nested components (button bar, toggle buttons, segmented controls)...