Clarity

Adobe’s design system team was invited to give a workshop at the Clarity Conference. The speakers included Shawn Cheris, Director of Experience Design, Mathieu Badimon, Design Manager, Veda Rosier, Senior Product Manager, and myself.

Real World Design Systems at Scale

How to establish and maintain a design system

Getting any design system off the ground takes a ton of planning, effort, and time. It requires thinking in systems, building coalition, and creating efficiencies for designers, engineers, and anyone else involved in the process of building digital products. Doing it at scale creates additional challenges and doing it at large company with many products adds yet another.

We built Adobe’s design language, Spectrum, to work on a huge and varied product ecosystem. Adobe’s offering includes dozens of connected desktop, web, and mobile experiences with millions of worldwide users. Some of our products are brand new and some have been in the market for decades.

In this workshop, we’ll share some of the valuable lessons learned in the six years we’ve been at this. Topics we’ll cover include:

• Design philosophy
• Building buy-in and coalition
• Governance and contributions
• Engineering strategies and tooling
• Documentation and on-boarding
• Inclusive Design
• Globalization

We’ll also have a Q&A with representatives from other large companies to share their experiences. So bring your questions!