<aside> ❔ What

Set standards to manage design while bringing consistency across all channels and establishing a shared language among designers and developers to practice upon.

A set of rules that define how we represent ourselves to the audience and our users.

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<aside> 🎯 Key objectives

• Bridge the gap between design and development, consistency, and standard of product
• Move from restrictive libraries and DLSs in practice
• Silos adopt the shared design language

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<aside> 🪪 Role

• Led the process
• Built, and shaped the design language </aside>

<aside> ❓ Why

• Compared to the early days when foundations were blurry and experimentation seemed the way to go, Codeyoung has seen a major shift in the design process and our stance amongst the competition.
• There were fewer people directly in the process before - communication and consistency weren’t a challenge, which is not the case now with silos: teams lack design knowledge and often exert their biases.
• With initiatives like product-led growth, we are aiming towards high brand differentiation. </aside>

<aside> 👥 People

• Me (Lead)
• Product designer (align, support, design)
• Sr. Developer, Product head (align, insights, and direction)
• CGO, founders (enabler, mentorship) </aside>

Process

The developers fetch elements from pre-existing libraries and DLSs like Material UI for quicker implementation, which affects the rhythm and consistency of the design language as they lack customization and flexibility.

Rather than building a design system from scratch (which would’ve been counterproductive), post a discussion - developers are nudged towards using different DLSs that offer customizability and flexibility.

I documented the design guidelines and blocks (such as elements and components) for designers and developers to refer to. The developers can align and tune the ones they are fetching from — resulting in a growing organic design library where new blocks are added as we move forward.

Some screens