Dear (none)Designer,

Welcome back to the eighteenth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.

One would think that design systems only arrived a decade ago. In fact, design systems have been around for quite a while now. Those who deal with typography and type setting will be familiar with the library attached to the book. The place we define styles for paragraph spacing, letterhead, and other parameters for the book that goes to print.

Adobe has introduced smart objects in Photoshop, enabling us to embed Illustrator graphics and other Photoshop documents within a master document. Fast forward a decade, and we arrive at an era where we use online tools to read another online document, defined by primitives such as font type and spacing, and drive a visual representation of another file within the same environment. This way, we can control multiple documents with the same style, brand, patterns, and behaviour.

Over the last three years, the expansion of the design system has undergone a significant transformation. Every designer is experimenting with the tokens. And everybody seems to have an answer with architecture they should use for their own service or product. Brand guidelines become digitised in this new environment, proclaiming a new transformative generation of forever-evolving brands.

Introducing the themes, styles, sub-brands, and so on. The design systems have become quite a complicated proposition. In some cases, becomes a product in its own right.

Do we need a robust design system for an online shopping app? Probably not. Do we need a design system for the multi-brand proposition that is distributed across 50 different domains? Absolutely yes.

This way, the emphasis does not lie in the direction of the brain or brand integration; it is more in line with the power and control of the brand across all digital touchpoints within this ecosystem. Acknowledging that each of these platforms might be built in different programming languages, consuming different Cascading Style Sheets reflecting on different CMS – content management systems, and perhaps reading different data databases with different structures and different content models.

As you can see, the variability and complexity are in question. The brands often constrain themselves to use one colour over the other pattern versus image or the size of the button in a very specific module, where designed systems create a transparent, flexible yet rigorous structure that allows adaptation to new decisions in a very short period.

While everybody is focusing on new plug-ins in Figma that help you organise the primitives, a new battle has begun around variables and their implementation within or outside of Figma. Designers are allowed to switch platforms and use new tools while maintaining the same variables and behaviour across different tools.
It brings the long-awaited flexibility for creativity and expansion of a great user experience, allowing them to define, manage, and adjust variables within these environments.

For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore hyper-performing teams, self-organising teams of one, teams of 10, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.