A storefront is a single source of truth for a system. It’s where any adopter (designers, developers, etc) can access the processes, documentation, and tooling needed for using the system. The concept is heavily influenced by the work of Brad Frost:
I tend to define a design system as all the things that go into doing design at an organization. That means the design system can include things like principles, high-level guidelines (UX conventions, UI code conventions, etc), UI components, documentation, tools, resources, and more. I tend to define a style guide as the happy home where all that design system stuff lives. A style guide is the storefront where all the ingredients of the design system are put out on the shelves.
A storefront can work for a system of any size. The implementation of a storefront can range from a custom built WordPress site to a company wiki, like Confluence. The tool itself isn’t as important as the need for a storefront of some kind.
Basically, there are processes, tooling, and documentation that enable people to do their jobs. The storefront connects people to that content.
Let’s walk through a few examples of how this process could work in different contexts.
We have a small, growing product team that is a mix of developers and product managers. They don’t have the budget for a design team yet, but will eventually. They are looking for the system to help their development team scale and make good design decisions.
Things to focus on:
We have a large drug company, ACME Co, that has hundreds of digital products and teams. Their product system needs to serve teams of various abilities, budget, and implementation complexity.