Design System DockFAQ & Glossary
Definitions for terms used throughout Design System Dock, plus answers to common questions.
Glossary
- Design System
- A documented set of reusable UI components, design tokens, and guidelines a product team uses to build consistent interfaces.
- Component
- A single reusable UI building block within a design system — a Button, Modal, or Date Picker, for example.
- Canonical Component
- Design System Dock's normalized name for a type of component (e.g. "Button") used to group equivalent components across different design systems so they can be compared side by side.
- Maintainer
- The company or organization that owns and publishes a design system.
- Platform
- The device or experience a design system targets — Web (Desktop) or Mobile.
- Tool
- The design tool — Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD — that a design system publishes editable source files for.
- Industry
- The sector a maintainer's product operates in (e.g. Fintech, Banking, Education), used to filter and compare design systems.
- Live Preview
- An embedded, interactive rendering of a real component (not a screenshot) available for a subset of canonical components in the Components tab.
Frequently Asked Questions
Methodology and corrections
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