One Design, many hands

While I was running Branch Transformation and shipping products across half a dozen platforms, the same problem kept coming back: nothing felt consistent. The only real fix was a shared design language and a place to iterate on patterns and components as a team.

Back then nobody had really pinned down what a design system was. We worked out the good practices slowly, alongside our developers and product partners. Two efforts ran in parallel: a top-down push for a global design library, and scrappier bottom-up work where individual teams fixed consistency in their own products.

Globally, we started with principles: the values we wanted our digital experiences to reflect. In a two-day workshop, lead designers shared what we each stood for and landed on three design principles and a mission for the whole team.

We built the styleguide for the Retail Bank products first. Calling it a design system would have been generous. It was closer to a snapshot of our design language across the platforms we owned: iPad and iPhone apps, interactive displays, ATMs.

Working closely with developers, we built guidelines and reusable components that let us ship faster and look like one product instead of five. It covered the usual ground, components, grids, color, type, icons, plus the parts I cared about most: motion, and a material-layers architecture.

As the org matured, we folded the local styleguides into one global system. A steering committee of leads and product partners kept pushing the language forward while all of us learned, in real time, how to run a design system at that scale. Everyone owned a piece of it.

I took motion. I wrote the animation guidelines and principles, built the examples and the do's and don'ts that every designer and developer worked from. That work is also where my "Jedi Principles of UI Animation" talk came from, so it ended up doing double duty.

Once the system was established and a dedicated team existed to maintain it, I turned to something different: a brand for the design org itself. An identity system for designers. Part of it sharpened our talent brand and helped hiring, part of it lined us up with the rest of the company, and part of it, honestly, was making a few hundred designers feel like one team.

Getting a few hundred designers to agree on anything visual is genuinely hard. Everyone has opinions and the opinions are strong. On top of that, the design brand had to sit comfortably next to the corporate brand, so we read as partners, not a side project doing its own thing. It took research, conversations, a lot of meetings, and a lot of iteration, but we got there. And because everyone had a hand in it, there was no dramatic reveal. The org already knew the brand, because the org had built it.

We kept gathering feedback and iterating, then took the brand out into the world: conferences, recruiting events, college fairs. Stickers, brochures, business cards, apparel for the team.

The brand and the system are both still alive over there, and they will outlast me. That is the whole point of building systems instead of one-offs.