Creating and Maintaining Successful Design Systems

Brad Frost

Your instructor: Brad Frost

Workshop includes:

🔖 Examples to take away
🗣 Interactive sessions
📺 Workshop recordings
🎤 Dedicated Q&A time
🏅 Smashing Certificate

Unfortunately, this workshop is fully sold out! But you can join the waiting list in case a ticket becomes available:

Workshop, 5×2h + Q&A • Tue & Wed, August 27 — September 10 2024
09:00 – 11:30 AM PT • 18:00 – 20:30 CET • Check your time zone ⏰

Design systems provide solid ground for us to stand on as we tackle the increasingly diverse and fast-moving digital landscape. This workshop will tackle all that goes into creating and maintaining successful design systems.

Here’s What You Should Be Expecting:

Interactive live sessions

5 × 2.5h live sessions

Practical insights

From methodology and workflow to creation

Hands-on exercises

With reviews by your teacher

Life-time access

To all video recordings and examples

Dedicated Q&A time

To ask all your questions

Smashing Certificate

A well-deserved reward for your work

We’ll cover the many benefits of design systems, introduce the atomic design methodology, discuss how to establish a cross-disciplinary pattern-driven workflow, detail the creation of a rock-solid component library and reference website, and tackle how to maintain a design system so it provides lasting value to your team and organization.

Who Is This For?

This is a full workshop, delivered in five 2-hour long sessions with lots of time for Q&A. It’s for UI designers, front-end designers, developers, and anyone responsible for the success of digital products.

You’ll walk away from this workshop with a solid foundation about how to plan, execute, and maintain a successful design system at your organization.

What will attendees learn in this workshop?

Selling Design Systems – We all know design systems and pattern libraries are great, but how do you get your clients, bosses, and teammates on board? We’ll make the business cases for design systems, and discuss tactics and tools for selling design systems to clients and stakeholders.
A Pattern-Based Process – Making modular interfaces requires massive shifts in our design and development process. We’ll discuss why front-end development is an essential part of the design process and demonstrate how tools like lo-fi sketches, style tiles, frontend workshop tools like Storybook and Pattern Lab, and others facilitate collaboration—and result in successful design systems.
Atomic Design Principles – We’ll cover core principles of modular UI interface design and introduce the atomic design methodology that helps connect your design system design/dev work to your actual product design/dev work.
Creating a rock-solid component library – The heart and soul of a successful design system is a component library that lives in code and directly powers an organization’s software products. We’ll cover all that goes into creating a UI component library that’s reusable, flexible, extensible, and easy to work with.
Anatomy of Effective Reference Website – A style guide reference website is the happy home for all a design system’s ingredients. A robust and well-presented reference site can help a design system truly take root at your organization.
Design System Maintenance – Like a fine wine, a design system should increase in value over time. We’ll discuss tactics and techniques like team structure, versioning, managing changes and additions to the system, communication strategies, and more to ensure design system provides lasting value to your organization.

About Brad Frost

Brad Frost is a web designer, speaker, writer, and consultant located in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of the book Atomic Design, which introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems. In addition to co-hosting the Style Guides Podcast, he has also helped create several tools and resources for web designers, including Pattern Lab, Styleguides.io, Style Guide Guide, and This Is Responsive.

Time & Schedule

This workshop is split over five days. Our virtual doors open at 8:45, we start at 9 AM PT.

The workshop sessions will run on the following days:

Tue, August 27, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT
Wed, August 28, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT
Tue, September 3, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT
Wed, September 4, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT
Tue, September 10, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT