Reward the best design system documentation providing clear and comprehensive guidelines that support your design system, from guidelines, to usage, to patterns. It should be easy to understand, well laid out, accessible and useful for everyone who consumes or builds your design system.
Criteria for Submission
- Serves a design system that caters to at least designers and engineers (eg. a UI Library by itself won’t cut it)
- Having it be accessible and usable by design system consumers (ie. you need to have launched it!)
- At a minimum, having documentation for foundational elements (logo, colors, fonts…) and components (buttons, forms, navigation…)
- A base level of promoting accessible usage
- An active design system that has been updated at least once in the previous 6 months
- The design system must belong to the submitter; it cannot belong to another company or person
Best Documentation Submission Process
To submit for this category, please provide a case study of your design system documentation. Read through the criteria below, and then hit the button to submit via a Typeform. You'll have the option to either fill in the form, or upload a case study document in PDF or Doc format.
1. Introduction
Start by introducing your organization and the design system you have created. Include a glimpse of the goals and principles of your design system and the purpose of your documentation (documentation target, documentation goals…). Explain context around your design system users: how big is the design system team, design and engineering organization and how many products and/or brands your design system covers.
2. Solution
Explain how your organization approached the creation of the design system and how adoption was integrated into how you built your design system.
📚 Documentation Overview
Provide an overview of your design system documentation, including the structure, format, and organization of your documentation. Explain how you build your documentation: your methodology, who is involved, how you prioritize, etc. Include screenshots, examples, or other relevant details that help to illustrate how the documentation supports the design system's goals.
🎨 Documenting Design Elements
Describe how your documentation specify design elements such as color, typography, icons, and components. Provide examples of how the documentation ensures consistency in the design of UI elements and how it enables designers and developers to make informed design decisions.
⌨️ Documenting Development Elements
Describe how your documentation specify development elements such as coding standards, best practices, and accessibility guidelines. Provide examples of how the documentation helps developers to create high-quality, scalable, and maintainable code.
⚙️ Implementation
Explain how the design system and its documentation were implemented within your organization. This could include the tools and processes used, how documentation was maintained and updated, how contribution and collaboration to improve documentation was encouraged and any challenges that were encountered.
3. Conclusion
Summarize the key points of the case study and emphasize the importance of effective adoption strategies in design systems. Reiterate why the design system and its adoption strategy should be considered for the best adoption category in the design systems awards competition.
4. Resources
🔗 If possible, share a link (zeroheight, confluence, notion…) or a file (pdf, ppt…) to give context to your design system documentation, whether that be sample pages, a link to your whole documentation, supporting data and data visualization, or feedback within your organization of the success of your documentation.
