Joshua Morris (Senior Front End Developer) explains what a design system is, why you should use one, and what the University has been doing to develop its own design system.
TLDR: A design system is a complete toolkit for managing design at scale, providing reusable ‘components’ and ‘patterns’ along with accompanying standards and governance.
Recently there has been a lot of discussion about how large organisations manage digital design at scale. Many of these organisations have brand guidelines created for printed media such as leaflets and flyers.
They also usually have large digital estates comprised of thousands of pages of content, presented in various ways such as different website page layouts and applications.
Digital teams responsible for the estate often try to apply strict print guidelines to this mixture of content, in a waterfall model, with varying degrees of success. Digital teams make their way through their digital estate updating brand, and then when print guidelines are updated, they restart.
As digital teams are generally smaller, how can you efficiently roll out and maintain a consistent brand across your digital estate?
Introducing a design system – a complete toolkit for managing design at scale.
