Usually, I would wait till I reach a certain point in a story (maybe learn a moral lesson as the climax) before I started writing about it. But I need a place to vent and since the Nigerian government took down Twitter last week, I’m deciding to revert to journaling with Medium.
Disclaimer: This is my first time creating a design system, UI Kit or any such structures system. My design process and knowledge is currently limited to making components I can reuse (some call it assets) and chaos. So I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m hoping to learn from this.
Day 1
Anyway, an introduction is underway.
I work as a designer in a team that’s building a place to help people track their wealth and transfer them to their loved ones when the time comes. You can check it out. As with many budding startups, we moved with madness speed and in 3 months, we launched the first Beta. We’ve moved to Testing and the feedback have been pouring in. Inconsistencies with design and the development, the little details that got ‘substituted’ during the journey to development (that one boils my brain) have shown an obvious disconnect between design and development as we were trying to speed through beta. Okaay.
A few more weeks in and more developers joined, the initial Frontend developer who worked with me on the design moved on and shit has hit the fan. So much needs to be cleaned up. At the same time, feedback means adding new features which just adds to the growing design chaos.
The new frontend developer spoke with me the other day, venting that he was slowed down because he had to create several components from scratch. Tears. I’m thinking a design system would help both our teams so I put it out to the teams and the leads and they all love the step. But I have no idea what to do or where to begin. Hahaha. And so it begins my pretties*.
*I make unnecessary references to cartoons.
