Journey

Why make this? #

Journey is a design system for the personal projects of Ste Grainer. Why make a design system for a bunch of personal projects? Isn’t the whole reason for design systems to help multiple designers work together? Well, sure, that’s one obvious benefit of large design systems, but it’s just as useful to have a record of design styles and decisions for a single designer. I’ve been building small style guides for projects for over a decade at this point. (See the original UXcellence Style Guide.) I’m hoping to revamp several related projects over the next few years to make them more consistent, and this seemed like a logical first step in that.

Also, making design systems is fun. Making one for myself is a form of therapy — like a worry stone — that is both educational and affirmational. It is a small place in my life where I can exert some influence over the outcomes I want to see.

Built with #

This project is primarily built in 11ty. I chose 11ty because I wanted a lightweight, static site with minimal complexity, and it came highly recommended from a number of front-end devs that I respect. The site is currently hosted on Netlify through their super nifty auto-build system. I save changes to a private repo on Bitbucket, and Netlify automagically builds a new version of the site.

Why not a public repo on GitHub? At some point, I may end up doing that, but for now, I wanted a private place to play with ideas, make mistakes, and learn. (Though I also have some qualms with GitHub using public repositories for training AI without explicit opt-in.)

About the name #

I went through a lot of potential names when I first started this project, starting with various words for rewards to fit with the theme of UXcellence. But that felt a bit presumptuous for a design system made for and maintained by one person for a bunch of random side projects.

As an long-time fantasy and sci-fi nerd, I then noodled with various names related to my favorite stories, but those all felt too specific to those properties. And are names like Balrog, Heart of Gold, or Kyber really fitting for a design system? BUT then I settled briefly on Quest, which stuck for a couple days.

The problem with the name Quest, for me, was that with quests in stories, the heroes often focus on the quest rather than the adventure they’re having along the way. Which led straight to Journey ... because the real meat with any good design system is the journey, not the destination.