This week I’m excited to introduce InVision Design System Manager (DSM).
Our mission with this new product is to create the definitive tool for creating and managing design systems, and helping product teams everywhere innovate at scale.
We recently welcomed the Brand.ai team to InVision, and have spent the last several months working with them to combine the best of their product with the InVision platform to create InVision DSM.
With InVision DSM, your team’s design language and library can now be managed and shared from the InVision platform—and accessed and updated in design tools such as Sketch and InVision Studio, as well as through a custom private web portal. We’ve also built advanced capabilities like permissions and roles, an API to keep code in sync, and enterprise-level security features like SSO and Private Cloud.
We’ve been hard at work on this one and are excited to share it with product teams who have needed this as much as we have.
Be the first to access InVision DSM
@payam_rajabi Awesome. I want to build something like this: https://polaris.shopify.com/ and we already use InVision for so many things. Being able to put it all together would be phenomenal. Also looking forward to Studio. :)
@avizuber totally! I actually worked on shopify's design system prior to joining InVision. Our aim with DSM is to put that power into everyone's hands so teams can create holistic design systems without having to build their own CMS and tooling from scratch.
@lisadziuba@payam_rajabi Does DSM make it easy to show snippets of code under previews of elements (buttons, text styles etc)? Apps like Lingo focus too heavily on design/images and ignore the code. Your API/hosted code sounds interesting, but sometimes you just need a quick & easy reference to check class names etc.
@lisadziuba@jmilr You can add all the documentation you'd like (markdown supported) for each asset and for collections of assets. You can also reference class names from the web interface, as well as from the API. And lots more coming in terms of design/dev integrations in the coming months!
Looks super nice, this is exactly what my team needs, we just had another discussion about design systems yesterday. With this and Studio I finally know what you've been busy with. One small request, if I may. After releasing these new things, please spend a little bit of time making sure all your products feel like one consistent whole. Right now, they feel somewhat disjointed. Thanks for all the awesomeness, and keep it real.
@gbks More than just disjointed, IMO. I feel like the old core of the product – prototypes – is sorely lacking in dev and product QA.
We basically avoid overlays because they're too buggy and confusing. Hotspots are still arbitrarily drawn by hand and can't be nudged. Performance issues, hotspots moving, comments that pile up (and can't be assigned, etc.).
Our team gets a little stressed when we decide we'll run a project through InVision. I don't want that!
:(
@cozysd I'm very sure they know about these things. While InVision is a big-ish company these days, I think they are still in a bit of a "move fast and break things" phase where they are rolling out new things very quickly to cover more territory. In true startup-style, that leads to various things just not being as polished as we maybe want. Hopefully they can catch up with that soon. That's my theory at least, haha :)
@gbks Yeah, that "startup mode" thing has been my excuse for them for like four years. At some point… I mean…
This is what happens with tons of tools. They see there's more money on the enterprise side of things, and that's where 95% of the resources go. Sucks to be a early supporter, necessarily loyal and necessarily not enterprise.
@cozysd I totally understand. That's one of the things I appreciate about Sketch. They are small and focused and their business model is laid out to keep things that way. InVision took lots of VC money, so there really is no choice other than ramping up. But let's hope for the best with all these shiny new toys.
🎤 💧
So stoked on this Clark! I've been building design systems internally for big Bay Area brands manually for over ten years and this looks like exactly where we need to head with our toolset. Can't wait to try it out and have my existing Brand.ai libraries update 🤘🏽💯🍕
Woo-hoo! Another week, another impressive launch from the InVision team.
I'm curious, will you support Sketch Libraries or similar sync functionality across multiple Sketch files?
@chadwhitaker yeah, totally. You'll be able to push updates to assets in DSM from any Sketch document, then pull all the latest changes into any other Sketch documents with a single click.
Since you can update each asset discretely, there's no risk of version conflicts at the library level - this is something that could occur if multiple people's changes to the Sketch library doc (shared on Dropbox, for example) overlapped.
This is awesome! Any chance components in a design system could eventually be shared/embedded individually? Something that could enable something as cool as, you know, a component search and browse website? How great would it be if you could type 'Button' and it would display variations of DSM components from a variety of organizations. Whoa!
@dmaczor You'll be able to view and browse all of your components, as well as the documentation and metadata related to them, all from the web. However we don't currently have plans to aggregate content from multiple organizations. Curious: what would be your main usecases for something like that?
@payam_rajabi a bit late on the reply but – I feel something that is often overlooked with design systems is how as an agency we can manage 3+ design systems for multiple organizations. I believe that answers your question re: usecase.
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look forward for the trial.
Pros:Live code integration ...
Cons:Once we test it we'll let you know.