Dear (none)Designer,

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

With a great response to our previous newsletter, we will stay in a financial environment for this month. It is no secret that one of the largest banks in the UK is a conglomerate of five independent banks operating under a single umbrella, known as Lloyds Banking Group.

To some designers, it sounds like a nightmare; to others, it sounds like an opportunity for unifying and standardising the output through a single design system called Constellation. As the organisational culture drives the majority of products and services, the feature-based delivery has a significant impact on the integration of Constellation.

The designers who spotted the opportunity are long gone, and their stories have already been forgotten. If we rewind a decade, we will see brave designers reviewing multiple design files, identifying inconsistencies, and striving for unification. The ambition has sparked the creation of a first design system, which was still developed in Adobe Photoshop and has served as the direction for the majority of the designs distributed, primarily in Lloyds Bank.

With the arrival of the Sketch application, InVision and later Figma, the Lloyds Banking Group has translated all its previous files into a single design location. No one would be surprised, as every other financial institution does the same, so it's no secret here. What is, however, fascinating is that by consolidating the other brands, in this case other banks, we have equally consolidated different products and services. As the ecosystem constantly evolves, the constellation team has created a feedback group to which they can gather, classify, size, and respond with precision across these five brands.

Fast forward five years, and these solid modules reside under a single core design system, featuring white-label components driven by a unified theming approach. This allows designers and developers to integrate all necessary changes required for digital stack maintenance in a very short period of time. It is worth mentioning that the design system team is a small unit operating independently of all other product teams.
This agility is critical in a large organisation like LBG. The team often approaches product teams and downloads the knowledge of an existing component that needs to be improved, bringing all the knowledge under one foundation. This way, the knowledge gets distributed across the entire organisation in a matter of minutes. This power for the ecosystem is accessible on the internal network, and the majority of the development relies on its accuracy in up-to-date relevancy.

And the team didn't remain only in visual components, every artefact of the design system is full of digits and documented in code that can be replicated and deployed to different work streams, achieving the consistency and stability of the entire position.

The greatest learning, above all, is the tight collaboration between design and development that has yielded many successes over time, especially in reducing the time to market and the time spent on QA prior to release.

There are plenty of design specialists, brand designers, engineers, and architects who should be mentioned who have inspired and governed the idea of an integrated design system. The Constellation has become the name that sings through the LBG and empowers designers every day.

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.