Design Systems Event – A recap

This week we organized a design community meetup at our co-working space in Ghent. In total we had three presentations, all of which were focussed on the topic of design systems.

I wanted to bring the design community together to talk about design systems. I believe every few years a topic comes along that we need to look at as a group. A topic that’s so extensive that it’s better to learn from each other. Design systems is one of those topics.

Introduction to Design Systems

I kicked off the event with a small intro to design systems.

I had been thinking about how to approach the topic of design systems. In the end, I took a historical angle: we have been doing design systems all along, it’s just that in 2019 it’s not just about applying your brand to signage and print materials. We are designing software, and because of this, we need something more than a traditional brand manual.

You can find my slides here.

Design as a Service

Stephen Verhalleman — who has been working on the design system for Teamleader — talked about design as a service. His talk focussed on actually getting a design system out there. It’s not enough to create the system – you need buy-in from management, you need your team to understand what it is and why it’s needed, and you also need to get it implemented.

You can find his slides here.

Don’t give yourself shitty work

Maarten De Roeck & Jonathan Dierckens from In the Pocket talked about design automation in their talk “Don’t give yourself shitty work”.

As an agency they were looking for a repeatable process when it comes to creating design systems. What they created is a system to automate parts of the process of bringing decisions from design to development. The system uses a token-based language (JSON) in the middle between design and development.

This way when the client changes their branding mid-project, it’s not a disaster that leads to a load of work, but a variable that can be changed and that can be applied to different rendering targets: apps, maybe AR – not just the web.

You can find their slides here.

I want to thank all the speakers and attendees for a wonderful evening. You can find some photos of the meetup here. If you are interested in future events, please join the Meetup group!