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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

The title ("Orbit – open-source design system documentation") is a bit confusing to me (I'm a technical writer so anything with "documentation" catches my eye). It seems like the provided link is just the documentation for a collection of open source web components? Or is the documentation itself open source? I'm not trying to be pedantic here, just asking in case I'm missing something. In other words it seems like the word "documentation" isn't necessary in the title in this case.

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Yep, sorry, it's probably a bit confusing. The whole design system is open-source, from its components to also the documentation. You can find it on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/kiwicom/orbit/tree/master/docs

Design system is common terminology for designers, akin to OOP.

Whole system of what, exactly? Title doesn’t make that clear.

It's a design system. You can read about it more here: https://uxdesign.cc/everything-you-need-to-know-about-design...

But basically it's a system how to design and develop applications (mostly mobile or frontend). It contains most of the time some visual foundation, standardized components, guidelines etc.

I think the point that parent was making is that it isn't at all clear what orbit is about. A "design system" is such an extremely vague term. Houses? Cupboards?

"Design system" is a pretty well defined term in the world of UX. For example: https://uxdesign.cc/everything-you-need-to-know-about-design...

“Design system” is pretty well defined in every field. And defined differently, which is the problem. I assure you engineering design is not the same thing. “UX design system” would have been better at least.

It's clear it's a [D]esign system for [D]esigners when you go to the site and see things like Colors, Typography, Spacing, Tone, etc.

It's fine if things are targeted! I don't expect all my technical documentation to fully namespace all their ambiguous terms in case a non-engineer shows up. This site is for [D]esigners and that's cool.

The problem is it's not clear about what the design system is for. After some digging I figured out it's for React. It shouldn't take that much time and effort just to figure out what it's even for. Why not just say 'open-source design system for React'? Why is it all so vague? Plus on the top of the page it says 'Open source design system for your next travel project.' What does that mean? I assumed it had something to do with traveling.

I also have some trouble figuring out which of the following ways to parse it

(open-source) ((design system) documentation)

(open-source design) (system documentation)

(open-source (design system)) (documentation)

I call strings like that "noun soup".

These nouns connect arbitrarily like molecules in a liquid, forming one completely opaque (and barely palatable) whole.

Ok, we've taken documentation out of the title above.

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