My role: Product Owner
It's easy enough to make a library of UI components. The hard part is figuring out the right design and adoption strategy for the given audience.
While the hundreds of publicly available design systems, blog articles, and conferences all make a claim as to what a design system is supposed to be, our challenge was to figure out the design system that this company needs. There are numerous independent development groups and no centralized design practice.
CDS needed to serve as a voice that defines the “right” design. We conducted a deep brand analysis of the company's other visual expressions, and from them determined some starting visual principles.
CDS served as the company's first official design system and has gained traction from many of the company's design groups. It has served to unify the various digital properties and strengthened cross-functional partnership with the corporate Brand team.
Your design system doesn't need to be like everyone else's.
While this design system doesn't yet have all of the elements of other design systems, it fit the purpose we needed.
