The Design Kit landing page.

During my time at RightScale, what was a rapidly-growing cloud management startup out of Santa Barbara California, I encountered the need to streamline our design processes. With numerous independent projects being undertaken by various teams, the absence of a centralized design resource became apparent. It was crucial to optimize our workflows and ensure a consistent user experience across all of our products.

Solution: The Birth of the "Design Kit”

What started as a shared color palette in a Sketch file gradually evolved into a robust and comprehensive design system, aptly named "Design Kit." This design system included:

• Branding Assets: Ensuring consistency in our brand representation.
• Color Guidelines: A cohesive color scheme that was adhered to across all projects.
• Extensive Icon Library: A unified collection of icons for consistent use.
• UX Patterns: A selection of user experience patterns to maintain uniformity.

The Design Kit color scales page.

Implementation and Impact

In addition to the style guide, I designed and developed detailed component-specific markup and styling documentation, similar to Storybook. These documents were crafted to be easily shareable and served as invaluable reference tools for our front-end developers. The documentation facilitated better communication between designers and developers, significantly improving our development efficiency and product quality.

Learning and Outcome

The process of creating and sharing "Design Kit" was a significant learning experience. It honed my skills in system thinking, collaboration, and documentation. The success of this project not only enhanced our design consistency at RightScale but also laid a solid foundation for my future endeavors in design systems.

A RightScale dashboard application

Conclusion

In 2019, RightScale was acquired, marking the end of my journey with the company. The "Design Kit" project stands out as one of my most significant learning experiences and highlights the critical importance of centralized design resources within rapidly growing tech organizations. This project also provided me with the invaluable opportunity to collaborate with colleagues across different teams, fostering relationships and teamwork that I might not have otherwise experienced. The insights and skills I gained through this process have been instrumental in shaping my approach to design and collaboration in future projects.