A design system brings designers, developers, and products together. It is a platform to identify, decide on, and document what to share, whether a visual style, design patterns, front-end UI components, and practices like accessibility, research, content strategy.

This workshop exposes you to essential foundations of this program — the kinds of features, tools, people, and practices involved — to equip you with techniques and activities to harden, spread, and sustain a system yourself.

We’ll cover those foundations, from visual style and UI component design to the technical and collaborative practices that get designers and developers to work together to make a robust, high-quality system together.

In This Workshop, You'll Learn:

Sessions will engage participants in hands-on activities, spark new ideas, and moderate challenging conversations so your team can:

• Dig into style like color, typography, space and size,
• Encode visual style in design tokens,
• Compose components — from atomic elements to sophisticated patterns,
• Deliver high quality, thoroughly tested features that adopters trust,
• Establish a workflow that combines design, code, and documentation
• Document design and code in a way designers and devs value.

Why You Should Attend

All too often, organizations have multiple products that are disjointed and inconsistent. Multiple design teams and development teams suffer from doing duplicative work, resulting in a customer journey that’s meant to be cohesive but ends up expensive or impossible to align and evolve together.

With a design system, your teams can take advantage of common design, code, and documentation tools to align their work. Design systems save organizations time and money and foster positive energy among those who value efficiency and reuse.

With a design system as a backdrop, you will see designers, developers, and product teams align and bridge gaps across a portfolio. All of that leads to the ultimate goal: creating a cohesive, high-quality experience for your customers delivered more efficiently.

Nathan has contributed to or consulted with over 60 design systems over his career, including leading teams through major releases at Morningstar, Verizon, Capital One, Target, Fidelity, Marriott and many more. He’ll bring deep knowledge with a nuanced understanding of how systems work in companies of varying scale, business types, and organization models.

Who Should Attend

Designers, front-end developers, product managers, content strategists, their leadership, and anyone interested in learning how to inject design systems into their broader organization. Content will evoke both design and code considerations, at times together, to bridge disciplines to share visual style, UI components, and documentation.

What Hardware/Software Do You Need?

Hand-on activities are collaborative as a team and at the classroom level on using pens, paper, Post Its and other similar materials. However, to get the most out of the workshop, you may need access to Figjam. You will not use design tools (such as in Figma or Sketch) or code in a code editor.

About Nathan

Nathan co-founded EightShapes with Dan Brown in 2006. He’s passionate about information architecture, UX, front-end dev, and leads design systems consulting at EightShapes. He wrote Modular Web Design in 2009, blogs frequently on Medium.com today, and speaks regularly at events worldwide.

Time & Location

This full-day workshop will be hosted at TCEA Conference Center and will take place the day before SmashingConf. The workshop will be running from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM on Monday, June 27.

Schedule for Monday, June 27

9:00 AM – Doors open, Registration
9:30 AM – Introduction & Kick-off
11:00 AM – Coffee Break
1:00 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM – Afternoon Session
3:30 PM – Coffee Break
5:30 PM – The End

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