Reimagining Design Systems at Spotify

Thanks to the authors:

BY SHAUN BENT

Engineering Manager and Dog Dad

BY GERRIT KAISER

Senior Design Manager

How we build design systems that fit our culture of autonomy

In November we introduced Encore, Spotify’s new approach to design systems. What’s cool about Encore is that it’s not just one thing: it’s actually a family of design systems, managed by distributed teams. In this post, we’ll share what motivated us to create Encore, how it’s structured, and how it’s different from what we’ve tried before.

Click here for more info: https://spotify.design/articles/2019-12-16/reimagining-design-systems-at-spotify/

Introducing Encore

Encore is the family of design systems that has everything teams need to build beautiful, scalable Spotify apps.

What’s different about Encore is that it isn’t a single monolithic thing. It’s a framework that brings Spotify’s existing design systems under one brand—a “system of systems.”

There are several design systems inside Encore, each managed by a different team around the company. And while these teams maintain the different systems, anyone who builds products at Spotify can contribute.

So is Encore Spotify’s “new design system”? Not exactly. The framework is new, but Encore actually reuses a lot of the great that went into our previous design systems. We’ve either straight-up rebranded them or extracted parts of them to create the new Encore systems.

The different systems stay connected because they’re all built using design tokens, and they live on the same website, following a similar structure defined by the Encore framework. Before, we had 22 disconnected design systems; now, we still have multiple systems, but they’re all connected and under the same umbrella.

Click here for more info: https://spotify.design/articles/2019-12-16/reimagining-design-systems-at-spotify/