DESIGN SYSTEMS

SCALING FOR GREATNESS WITH A SOLID FOUNDATION

Simply put, a Design System is a comprehensive repository that gives your organization the advantage of scaling digital products with more consistency, efficiency, and increased velocity, speeding up releases without compromising quality.

A Design System is more than just a style guide or pattern library, it is a blueprint for product development where all design principles, visual assets, and patterns are thoroughly documented with their code references. As a result, design can scale right alongside development. Design Systems can create value by allowing you to:

Deliver Digital Products Faster

A component-based toolkit accessible in one place allows for a more chunked-out Agile process, speeding up releases without compromising quality. It frees designers and developers from being caught up in redundant questions and repetitive work, enabling them to deliver the product with increased velocity and a shorter time to market.

Increase Product Value and Quality

Because the shared design system includes approved assets and conventions, designers and developers are more autonomous without closing off into silos. The reusable components are built upon each other, sparing teams from repeatedly maintaining their code, which is often duplicated as they often resort to writing it from scratch on demand.

Create a Consistent User Experience

A single, shared source of truth helps you maintain consistency in the interface and predictability of the behavior of the product as it exponentially scales. It facilitates the creation of coherent experiences and eliminates inefficiencies that work their way into the product as different people contribute to its development and design.

ENTER DESIGN SYSTEMS

A design system is a product that can be described as a living system of guidelines, reusable code, design assets, and tools that help organizations deliver consistent, on-brand experiences at scale and over time.

Deliverables

Typically, Design Systems are built, used, and maintained by product teams as references when making daily design decisions or implementing solutions in code. A comprehensive Design System usually contains:

  • Design principles and purpose

  • Brand identity assets

  • Functional patterns (Design+Code)

  • Guidelines (UX/UI/tech)

  • Tools (UI Kit, Pattern Library, … etc.)

  • Examples and best practices

Design Systems also serve multiple products over several business units to deliver a strong brand identity across all platforms.

Content Patterns

Content and microcopy appear all over your digital product, and it is essential to set clear parameters for exactly when and how it will be used each time you implement a component.

Design Systems offer an easy-to-use platform that facilitates better design decisions where your team can build pages or email templates from a library of content modules, stack them, customize, and export them to be aligned with your organization’s content strategy.

UX Flow Kit

With components and content pattern libraries defined, your team can easily create user flows, site architecture, design annotations, and much more in order to standardize user experience across your platforms.

Thus, unifying user experience and increasing the predictability of interaction with your product while accelerating high-quality application development without risking consistency.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Design Systems are crafted from real product work, not by going away for a while to lay the foundation for teams to adopt. The best methodology to create a comprehensive Design System is through direct engagement with the product teams to collect and scale the foundations that they are already employing.

  • Phase One

    Orientation

    Conduct meetings with your team to collect and scale your design needs, and to set the goals and objectives.

  • Phase two

    Audit & Analysis

    Create an inventory of components employed and review the system architecture.

  • Phase Three

    Design & Delivery

    The show-and-tell part of the where new designs are displayed and tested in an iterative process.

  • Phase Four

    Preservation

    Review and provide documentation and maintenance plans against all approved assets.

WORKING TOGETHER

Getting Started...

Working together is best done when teams from your organization are cross-disciplinary, they - generally - consist of at least one of each of the following:

  • Product Manager.

  • Senior-level Brand Designer.

  • Senior-level System Engineer.

  • Senior-level UI Designer

  • Front-end & Back-end Developers

  • Content Writer or Strategist.

If everything described above sounds like something you’ve been looking for, and you believe that we’re fit to work together, drop me a line at info@monsterworks.io, and let me know what you got in mind, I’ll be happy to work with you and your team.

Small Notice: Creating a Design System takes a bit of time and lots of effort, and so does the approach to understanding your unique business, teams, and end-users needs. Establishing this type of system is not a must from the beginning as it can change with time, but figuring out the system model is recommended from the beginning, and not doing so will eventually cause lots of headaches when change is required.