Loft Design System Management
Establishing a new designer & engineering relationship.
Squad
Federated Group of Engineers, Designers, and Product
The Challenge
How do we create, manage, and scale a design system in a rapidly expanding environment?
The start of my journey into Design Systems began shortly after I started working at Xometry. The team was working to build an official design system that gathered the disparate components across multiple platforms, and creating a single space of typescript enabled components and tokens.
First Steps
Planting a flag in a single source of truth for engineers and designers.
At the start of my experience with the design system, I began learning the in's and out's of our existing system in Sketch. The components were scaterred into multiple locations and versions, without a single source of truth or documentation.
Creating a Common Language
Creating a shared language of tokens for talking about the system.
To quickly gain alignment between teams, I worked alongside engineers and a product leader to establish a common set of variables and tokens that we could share and expand. Doing this improvement greatly cut down on misinterpretations between design and engineer, and gave us a point of reference for both teams to pull from.
Creating a Common Language
Version Control and Synchronization between design and engineering.
To ensure we were all looking at the same version of the system, we implemented a new version control that was shared between teams. Additionally I represented design as we established a design system usage standard for all technology and product in the company. This standard helped to ensure versions were regularly checked and updated if they fell out of date.
Continuing Evolution
Establishing Usage Standards
As part of the strategy to align the company behind a design system, I helped to author Technical Standards for version usage of the design system. This was supported and approved by the Chief Technical Officer, and led to key discussions of how to best technically use the design system across the many parts of the organization.
Continuing Evolution
Facilitate and Lead Decision Making
Another key aspect of keeping the system to evolve was my regularly scheduled conversations with design and technology to identify accessiblity issues and bugs. Creating a space for design and development to collaborate to improve our system.
Continuing Evolution
Implement Best Practices in Figma
In order to better serve our users, we must build a system that is agnostic of the end goal, and allows for transactions to occur. If we provide quality transactional tools, suppliers will prefer our service.
“Here’s the simple truth: you can’t innovate on products without first innovating the way you build them.”
― Alex Schleifer, Airbnb
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