An Event Apart: “Maintaining Design Systems”

Brad Frost speaking at An Event Apart Orlando 2018 on October 9, 2018

By now, ’most every in-house team has some form of design system initiative underway. Yet many designers and developers on those teams still struggle to make the system really take root in their organization. Working together, designers and developers create wonderful, reusable components, tools, guidelines, and documentation. But if those elements don’t reflect the reality of how the organization builds its products, all their effort is for naught. Having spent years creating, evangelizing, and teaching design systems and corporate integration of same, Brad Frost is here to share strategies and methods to ensure your design system stands the test of time. You’ll learn how to keep your system and the products it serves in sync, and you’ll understand how to maintain and evolve your design system to give your users get the best possible experience.

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An Event Apart: “Why Design Systems Fail”

Una Kravets speaking at An Event Apart Orlando 2018 on October 9, 2018

Design systems are hot right now, and for good reason. They promote a modular approach to building a product, promote organizational unity, and ensure stability via reusable code snippets and utility styles. They make prototyping a breeze, and provide a common language for both designers and developers. But sometimes design systems are underutilized within organizations. Why is that, when they’re so darn useful? In an engaging hour, Una will draw on years of experience to explore what makes design systems successful, analyze real examples of success and failure, and show how to make sure your design system has the building blocks it needs to grow into a successful product.

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An Event Apart: “Scenario-Driven Design Systems”

Yesenia Perez-Cruz speaking at An Event Apart Seattle 2018 on April 2, 2018.

Unified design systems are essential to building, maintaining, and evolving our sites and products. By empowering disparate teams via a common visual and UX language, they help us create cohesive user experiences. But creating a unified system that scales to serve a variety of content and use cases can be challenging. Sharing insights from her experience creating a unified design system for eight media brands with eight distinct editorial strategies, Yesenia will show how to approach a design system via a user-centered lens. Learn how being scenario-driven helps you design a scalable system that responds flexibly to specific contexts.

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An Event Apart Orlando 2016

Photo source: Zeffrey Zeldman
Photo source: Zeffrey Zeldman

I was fortunate enough to attend An Event Apart in Orlando this month. I’ve posted my complete notes separately, but below you will find some of the key themes from the conference as well as an overview of each talk. You can also take a look at Articles, Links, and Tools From An Event Apart Orlando 2016 for more information and resources.

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