Sparta Design System

Creating a design system for a suite of products

SDS
Overview

I was tasked with improving the first in-house design system for Venture Garden Group. The design system was meant to streamline design workflows, make start-to-end deliverable times faster, to standardise the usage of reusable components and font styles, and to implement standard base spacing units, font hierarchy increments, and more into the design team’s workflows. A design system is the combination of visual language, tools, technology, and people— and people are the most important part. It was my job to design and creatively direct the creation and documentation of the design system.

My contribution

Design systems
UX
Product design

Team

6 x product designers
1 x product manager
4 x engineers

Year

2021
The Process

I started out experimenting with three different internal companies that the design system would be applied to, discovering, establishing and stress-testing a style and library of components and patterns. Later in the process, I created an adaptive/responsive library of UI components, synced and made available to a team of designers via Figma Library. This allowed the team of product designers to quickly construct UIs and flows using consistent pre-made, editable and flexible symbols, so they could focus on UX, and not re-designing the product over and over.Every detail of the system's design was documented, initially (for speed) using Google Docs so it was easily accessible by the team, and later developed into a website. And the implementation/development of the system was tracked via GitHub between myself and the engineering lead, built using React JS and Sass, including integrating CSS/Sass I had written while designing and documenting the system components. Below is a taster of the design system, and the Figma Library of components. More details on this case study coming soon...

"David is extremely thoughtful and creative with his approach to addressing user needs. He based his thinking and approach on clear principles and while he was systematic, his work would regularly push into “out of the box” territory. The resulting design work was always very strong. Context: David helped us ideate a next-gen design system  experience. He is an excellent designer."

Chukwuma Udokproro

Lead Product Designer @ Venture Garden Group
Learnings

1. Working on projects for big companies - By working at Venture Garden Group, I got a glimpse at many big companies I use to dream about. I also got to work on projects that will impact millions of people and at the beginning I couldn’t realise I had a sit at those tables.

2. Weekly Design Sprints - We had a goal for each week and we had no option but to deliver. After each sprint, we would take a moment to enjoy the accomplishments of the week and start planning the next sprint.

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