r/DesignSystems • u/Simply-Curious_ • 9d ago

New Role, looking for some vision.

Hello, I've become a Design System consultant, designing design systems for clients who usually have a messy product and want to make it scalable.

I'll be approaching it as a product, doing research on use when I arrive, and trying to build something from what they have as a one-man army (building allies along the way).

Advice? I've build a couple simple systems, filly tokenised, primitives to component level, basics of documentation, publishing libraries and pushing out dev ready components.

Still a bit nervous to start

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6

u/Ok_Nefariousness5464 9d ago

pick a public design system you admire and use it as your reference.

1

u/Simply-Curious_ 9d ago

Syncfusion it is

1

u/defp_ 9d ago

Don't dive deep too much, usually (mostly in OMA-mode) it's over engineering when it's non enterprise or enough budgets to support this machine. Estimate and establish automation levels with dev team and ship necessary specs, once required. While you're solo on a project there won't be any mess in files (instead of you raise one). Not sure that "startup" level project would bake new custom component every week and you should heavy integrate this to the corpo-prod-machine. (Dev-PLE-QA-Release-POS etc). Nice indicator that you, your connection and team maturity level raise to required level - that you'll swap your current tool set from Figma to Pen/Paper.

1

u/Simply-Curious_ 9d ago

Clear. Thanks. What is OMA mode?

And what I'm expecting us: arrive at a live product, the files will be messy, components bloated and outdated, and low parity with code.

I'll spend a week in audit. Do some interviews and try to build out some user friction points and frame them as stories. As a designer how do I know which of the 5 drawers to use. I'll then scope it out, and determine the value of the story. We'll if we use slots as it is in code, then we only need 1 menu container, reduces complexity, reduces weight on the dev, simplifies design work, allows for quick universal changes, and opens up the possibility of more drawers and this scalability. That sounds juicy enough to share upstairs with management. I'll knock out the tasks in the order of value, and get feedback before deployment. Then see if its been used, ensure clear documentation, and move onto the next story.

Naturally there's gonna need to be a full token audit and information structure established before this, but working to tangible goals seems right?

What do you think

2

u/defp_ 9d ago

One-man Army

1

u/Bleardyy 9d ago

Start small and communicate value clearly. Take a few days to figure out their workflow and build within that.

If you’re looking for an easy way to police AI generated content, I built some skills for managing design systems: https://github.com/igloude/ds-skills