Today, Airbnb’s design team open sourced its internal library for writing React components that easily render directly to Sketch. Instead of trying to get Sketch to export to code, the Airbnb team spent its time on the opposite — putting the paintbrush in the hands of the engineer.
Everyday engineers and designers have the luxury of operating without design systems, but large companies ignore them at their own peril. Airbnb, for one, has dumped a lot of resources into developing design components that can be applied across the company. But despite the requisite planning, Airbnb was still struggling to keep its iterative design system in sync with Sketch templates, holding up development.
If you’re not familiar with design systems, they’re the design DNA of any company that has multiple teams designing products. Imagine if the Airbnb team working on…