I’m making a spec for design system documentation

Let me get this out of the way–I have no right to be doing this. But I’m doing it anyways. It’s high time for a standard spec for design system documentation. So I’m making one. I call it the Design System Documentation Spec. Because that’s what it is. A design system’s most valuable asset is its institutional knowledge. It always has been. But that knowledge isn’t treated like it’s valuable. It’s stored on third-party servers, in proprietary formats, or in no format at all. The industry is now finally understanding the value of knowledge management. Not for the right reasons, but I’ll take what I can get. I’m seizing the moment to pitch this. I want this spec to cover common design system documentation topics. It has to be extensible for the areas it omits. Using the schema has to be straightforward–but not in a dumbed-down kind of way. A spec like this would solve all sorts of issues design systems teams struggle with. Such as: A standard format makes it easier to have a true single…