Become an Advocate for SLDS

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe the structure and responsibilities of a design system team.
  
• Advocate for SLDS adoption.
  

A Picture of the Modern SLDS

You may ask, “Is it possible for something so great to be even more great?” Well, SLDS fans, the answer is yes. Here’s an overview of where the Salesforce Lightning Design System is today—and how you can be a part of it.

Communal Responsibility

The Salesforce Lightning Design System is the responsibility of an entire community. The people who create, manage, and use SLDS share that responsibility. The system design team curates SLDS, but anyone can suggest an addition or modification. The success of SLDS depends on active participation from the SLDS community.

Here’s how it works.

The designers and engineers of the Salesforce design system team:

• Curate the design system as an open-source project.
  
• Maintain the lightningdesignsystem.com website.
  
• Educate people about design systems in general, and SLDS in particular.
  
• Build design system tools, such as developer environments, plug-ins, design files, and more.
  
• Coordinate with Salesforce engineering teams to deliver code for Salesforce products.
  

Meanwhile, Salesforce researchers, accessibility specialists, product designers, product managers, and engineers contribute individual patterns to the design system. Contributions come from identifying problems that SLDS patterns haven’t yet solved. The design system team works closely with contributors.

Beyond this internal cyclical process is a large external ecosystem of partners and customers who build apps on the Salesforce platform. Like any open-source project, SLDS relies on an active open-source community to generate ideas, provide feedback, and submit contributions.

Why Use SLDS?

No one is required to use the Lightning Design System, but most Salesforce designers do—and for good reason. SLDS doesn’t promote consistency just for consistency’s sake. Consistent design improves the user experience because users know what to expect and how to use standard parts of a Salesforce app. Good design puts user needs first. If the best design for your use case doesn’t use SLDS, that’s OK. You choose how much of SLDS to use. The design team’s goal is to make you want to use SLDS.

So why should you use SLDS? Using SLDS can help any size project run smoothly, reducing both workload and technical debt—a benefit that can apply in areas including Salesforce Lightning themes, display density, right-to-left localization, and dark mode. SLDS helps you build solutions that:

• Use structured, proven, trusted patterns.
  
• Improve feature adoption.
  
• Scale faster, with less technical debt.
  
• Provide accessibility for users with disabilities.
  
• Reflect Salesforce branding.
  

Becoming a Contributor

Contributors are a huge part of what makes SLDS what it is. As customers and partners use SLDS, they become familiar with its structure and capabilities. Over time, users can envision improvements to SLDS that benefit all users. 

To contribute to SLDS, use the open-source GitHub repository for SLDS. You’ll help your fellow designers and engineers inside and outside Salesforce to save time, drive consistency, and share knowledge. At the same time, you benefit from others’ contributions.

The bar for SLDS contributions is set quite high. Before you design and submit a complete solution, submit a brief proposal. If the design team believes that what you propose will work well, they’ll give your idea a thumbs-up and you’ll move forward together. Contributors also provide documentation for pattern design guidelines, developer implementation guidelines, iconography, tokens, and blueprints.

SLDS Ambassadors

To maximize the benefits of any design system, you need to make sure that product teams are using it efficiently. One way to do this is to nominate an SLDS ambassador at your company.

Ambassadors are SLDS experts who serve as liaisons between designers and developers and the SLDS curators, sharing information, feedback, suggestions, and contributions. They act as consultants, guiding teams through SLDS processes and helping others get the most out of the system. When you designate a person (or a group of people) at your company to be an SLDS ambassador, you give them a platform to pass knowledge to the rest of the team—and make SLDS better for consumers.

Ready to get started? Read on for the tools and resources you need to use SLDS.

Resources

• Lightning Design System open-source GitHub repository
  
• Evolving a Design System at Scale
  
• Lightning Design System website
  
• Introduction to SLDS, including resources and guidelines for designers and developers
  
• SLDS Accessibility Overview