Design Systems

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About this service

Summary

Providing comprehensive art direction and design systems expertise to help clients establish cohesive visual identities for their brands to ensure consistency across multiple platforms.
The benefits of having a design system in place
Brand consistency and recognisability.
Clear visual guidelines to ensure your brand's visual identity.

Process

Before anything, let's do a discovery call and figure out what you really need and if a design system is really the best solution for you.
Meeting: Discovery call.
Meeting: Brief and brainstorming session to see and understand the scale of the solution, and what you require to be covered.
Design System creation.
Documentation and comments to help developers understand the system.
Meeting: Walkthrough of the design system and feedback.
Potential changes to the system based on your feedback and completing the Design System.
Finished, handing over the design system to you.
Depending on what you need the process might change, e.g. if you want me to brief developers on the system or if you want to have it tokenised. These are things we would have to discuss and figure out before we start the process.

What's included

  • Colour Palette

    Directions on which colours are to be used within the restrictions of the visual identity. Potentially separated into Primary, Secondary, Alternatives, Grayscale or brand and themes.

  • Grid System

    Grid Systems are necessary to ensure your brand's visual consistency and output. We will set a clear set of rules to outline the structure of which the grids are to be implemented and used by the developers to improve scalability and ensure your product looks great on any device.

  • Typography Hierarchy

    Today's digital solutions require clear outlines of the typography hierarchy and structure. Within the Design System that I build, I will create a base hierarchy that changes/scales based on the grid system (screen size).

  • Spacing

    A simple outline of how spacing can be used within the design system.

  • Icons, Illustrations, and custom vector visuals

    Many use icon libraries for standardised icons. I often recommend Google Material Design's icon library to cover the standard requirements but leave open the opportunity for illustrations and custom vector visuals if such should be necessary within your visual identity. We have this page within the system to help developers export vectors easily and ensure you get the best quality displayed in your product. Furthermore, this creates a clear overview of what has to be implemented or is available within the Design System.

  • Accordions, Buttons, and Toggles

    We will cover the options available for accordions, buttons, and toggles in a clear overview. This is mostly to ensure consistency and recognisability, but also to help developers understand how these should look and be created.

  • Form Elements

    We will cover all of the required elements to create forms, e.g. Radio Buttons, Checkboxes, Simple on/off toggle buttons, Input field, Textarea, Select block, Datepicker, Sliders, and potentially more advanced options such as; Select with Search, Multi-select (and with search), Advanced Datepicker. All of this depends on what your solution requires. We will cater to those needs, but keep some of the beyond-necessary elements if they could be of future use.

  • Common Modules

    Not all solutions might require these, but there will be some basic subjects covered by the system that perhaps can be used in the future. E.g. Alerts/Notifications, Avatars, Breadcrumbs, Dividers, Progress bar, and Pagination.

  • Logo, Favicon, and images

    There will be another page covering some of the brand necessities such as your brand logo(s), the favicon required for browsers, and image components to be used within the design. Usually, different image components covering environment, culture, product, and avatar images.

  • Article Structure (if necessary)

    Many write posts, have news, or otherwise publish things to gain organic traffic or share with their customers or community. To cover such areas we set up a general structure for how this content should look – ensuring readability and the optimal spacing between elements.

  • Effects

    Not all use these, but if we do use a drop shadow, blur effect or the alike then we should cover this in the system as well. Mostly to make developers aware of the options so that they ensure these are possible within the solution they develop.

  • Custom Cursor

    Of course, this subject is not possible on touch devices, mobile and tablet, but elsewhere many modern digital solutions advance themselves by using custom cursors as an additional support to the accessibility design. These thoughts and aspects have to be covered visually as well for the developers and for us to know which possibilities there are to choose from. In a simple overview, we will visually display such options and create any we find necessary.


Skills and tools

UI Designer
Responsive Design
Digital Accessibility
Figma

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