Systems and Stages: Building a Design System and a Systems Team

Design systems can organize and clarify a team’s design practice. Made of patterns and component libraries, they add a level of cohesion across designs. This, of course, can only occur once you have a design system in place. So how do you build one in the first place? Nick Stamas, the Creative Lead on the Business Products Team at WeWork, set out to do just that. He surveyed WeWork’s existing designs, noting inconsistencies, and pitched the idea of a design system to help streamline the work being done. His challenge was building this all out while WeWork continued to grow. Nathan Curtis, author of Modular Web Design, has identified stages that occur when implementing a design system. He shares his insights into Nick’s story and how you go from building the system to working as a systems team. He will be joining us in Boston, November 13-15 to teach one of the daylong workshops at the UI22 conference. For more information, visit uiconf.com.