Design Systems and Designing for Scale

Recently, organizations have begun to build systems to help them manage their design and code as a set of reusable patterns to help them reduce repetition, increase consistency, and made their applications easier to maintain and scale.

Just the simple use of applications like Sketch, InVision, Pattern Lab, Storybook, and even custom tools is being loosely-termed as a "Design System." As a result, these applications are being adopted rapidly by designers and developers alike. But, Design Systems are much more than that.

Design Systems are tools, software, and human processes for managing repeatable and modular design patterns within an organization. Too often, these are considered part of another technology product - simply a system that serves a single application. Instead, we need to think of these systems as a product that serves other products. They are distinct from a CMS or software product, but they serve those as an organizational tool that brings consistency, scalability, and maintainability to an application.

Exploring this new product concept is something that aids the ability of software like Drupal to scale within the organization. Additionally, it helps foster collaboration between designers and developers by creating a shared language and expectations for how experiences flow from user needs.

This session is for all levels of experience. It will be helpful for anyone thinking about design at scale, implementing a Design System, or understanding more about how front-end development and design are building products to serve whole organizations, not just single applications.

This session will contain some real-world examples of Design Systems along with some client-tested best practices for how to implement them as a product that serves Drupal.

I'm also submitting this as a 90 minute session with Evan Lovely. If selected, that session will dive more deeply into the code, tooling, processes, and examples used to build a Design System and connect it to Drupal.