Meet Spectrum, Adobe’s Design System
Summary
We built Adobe’s design language, Spectrum, to work on a huge and varied product ecosystem. Adobe’s offering includes dozens of connected desktop, web, and mobile experiences with millions of worldwide users. Some of our products are brand new and some have been in the market for decades. Hear from two of Spectrum’s designers as they give an overview of the design system and answer your questions about building and scaling a design system!
Key Insights
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Spectrum supports over 130 Adobe products across three business units and multiple platforms, requiring a highly scalable and flexible design system.
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The design team does not implement components directly; implementation is handled by separate engineering teams, necessitating strong cross-team collaboration.
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Spectrum evolved from occasional quarterly versions to individual component versioning, improving change tracking and prioritization by implementation teams.
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A transparent design checklist tracks component quality and health with open issues linked to Jira tickets to prioritize fixes and improvements.
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Spectrum Contributions is a sister site hosting 110+ work-in-progress components, increasing visibility and community feedback outside the core team.
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A design token repository serves as a single source of truth for all component attributes like color and sizing, ensuring consistency and ease of updates.
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Nate Baldwin highlights naming as the hardest ongoing challenge due to multiple platforms and diverse teams; content strategist Jess Satel assists in establishing a clear terminology.
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Spectrum balances consistency and respect for platform-specific UI conventions by either skinning native components or documenting deviations explicitly.
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Accessibility and color theming are managed by defining target contrast ratios first, then generating compliant colors via the custom tool Leonardo.
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The Spectrum team fosters community via multiple engagement channels including Spectrum Guild quarterly meetings, town halls, office hours, and Slack, improving documentation and prioritization.
Notable Quotes
"Our team does not actually build the components consumed by product teams. Implementation teams report to their respective engineering and product orgs."
"We moved from versioning the entire system quarterly to individually versioning components, so changes are easier to track and prioritize."
"Naming things — components, properties, parts — is the hardest thing and it never stops. Thankfully, we have Jess Satel, our amazing content strategist."
"We try to keep things as consistent as possible in terms of the API but document where platforms need to deviate to be good citizens of their environment."
"Instead of choosing colors then checking contrast, we flipped the process and started by defining contrast ratio targets and then generating colors to meet them."
"We capture component design decisions and health transparently with checklists; unchecked items correspond to open tickets for prioritization."
"We have weekly meetings with implementation teams to design APIs, discuss progress, and address issues to ensure alignment."
"Spectrum Contributions site gives visibility to work-in-progress components, making users more vocal with feedback that we can capture and raise."
"Our UI kits are generated through JavaScript based on tokens, meaning less manual work, fewer errors, and consistent updates across themes and platforms."
"Spectrum is about empowering collaboration across products, disciplines, and clouds — not just providing tools but supporting people using the system."
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