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Comment by warpech | Hacker News Reader

The term "design system" made a great career in a very short time. It wasn't really coined until 2016.

That's not correct. A quick search using Google's Ngram viewer shows that "design system" peaked in 1986, and had quite a long history before that too, starting in the 1960s.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=design+system&...

Are you sure about the meaning though? Afaik, it started to be used in the context of UX/UI starting from the book "Atomic Design". That is also the earliest reference in the Wikipedia article.

Of course, there were systems in graphic design used earlier [1], but before 2016, the thing in the OP would be called "The US Web Design Patterns" or "...Language" or "...Toolkit" or "...Library", for the lack of a common term.

[1] http://assets.runemadsen.com/classes/programming-design-syst...

I'm not sure I understand the distinction you're drawing between UX/UI and graphic design. To me it seems obvious that the concept of a "design system" has been around for a while and has been applied universally in many sub-fields of design.

It doesn't seem super relevant whether or not there is a CSS/JS framework to support a design system — that seems more like an implementation detail.

Nope, I've worked with and on design systems since 2010.

And Brad Frost's Atomic Design [0], a formal system for developing a design system, was first written in 2013.

0 - https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/

I shall stand corrected. According to Twitter, the hashtag #designsystem started to appear in the context of UX in 2012 [1]

I you used that term in 2010, you are a real pioneer.

[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=(%23designsystem)%20until%3A201...

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