Get Your Design Organised

Ana Nicolau shows you how digital design’s journey paved the way for design systems, what they’re for and how best to use them.

- Ana Nicolau

Digital design has been navigating uncharted waters for about 20 years, since the advent of mainstream internet. In the 1990s, any aspect of ‘design’ was in full control of the programmer – black backgrounds, bright web-safe colours in a highly pixelated 8 x 8 font, infamous vintage gradients that are now making a comeback and ASCII character drawings that made anything look cool.

At the time, concerns about web layout, information architecture and user experience were secondary – or even tertiary – in relation to content. The more that could be dumped on a web page, the better. Whatever information you couldn’t include on the landing page would be signalled by hyperlinks to drive the user to additional pages – who can forget those long, heavy text lists of rainbow coloured, underlined hyperlinks? In some cases, there was a certain attention given to navigation but only by absolute logical need. Navigational consistency between pages was another matter. Early days.

When designers joined the web revolution, it was like a whole new world had been unveiled. Suddenly, content didn’t have to be static. You could not only hyperlink it by absolute meaning but also create an interrelation of meanings with other types of content within the same environment.

Hyperlinks could be a full line of copy or just a couple of words, without any particular hierarchy. The groundbreaking innovation was that hyperlinks enabled the creation of more complex journeys – you could now tell a story. These were the early stages of what we now call user journeys, where web designers defined how and when the user would see and interact with content.