A new look and feel
When our new VP of Design was hired, one of the first things he did was greenlight work to do a "visual refesh" of the product. We contracted a design agency to develop a new visual style for the product, and they delivered a basic style guide and some hero pages.
After that it was up to us to turn their artifact into a living system that would contain the necessary details for designers to work with.
Turning a style guide into a living Design System
I led the effort to develop the internal documentation, tooling and processes with some colleagues from the product design team. Internally we named the system "Daylight".
Everyone appreciated the benefits to efficiency and consistency that you get from a Design System, but actually creating one and maintaining it is a lot of work! It involved a lot of systems thinking and cross functional work:
- Designing & vetting the UX patterns for the product
- Documenting the nitty-gritty behaviours (eg: hover states, etc.)
- Providing reusable assets for internal design tools.
- Developing processes to make sure designers stay "on pattern"
One of the challenges we had was maintaining a design system which had no formal ownership. As a small design team, we couldn't afford to have a single person dedicated to updating it, so we needed to figure out ways to get the entire team to contribute. You can see some of the process artifacts I developed here.
In 2019, I was invited to give an hour-long talk at Fluxible, a popular UX conference, about our lessons learned setting this system up.
