As Levi Strauss & Co. navigated the transition from a world where shopping was done almost entirely in person to one where consumers want to find what they need from the comfort of their own homes, there was an issue with a complete lack of underlying structure to build that digital presence. I joined the Levi's team with a central goal of uniting teams behind a single, central source of truth for all design and development tools. This meant building the component library with an accurate depiction of patterns, guidelines, and specifications for design to work from, marketing to reference, and product to build from, in complete alignment and reflection of what users were seeing on both site and application.
File Structure
The focus here was on making it completely clear where each tier of information could be found, what it represented, and what kind of historical context and data led us to the solutions we have today.
Atomic Design
If you dive into the core of design systems, you find a pattern in how companies are defining the most basic repeatable parts and principles of their identities, all the way up through the most specific depictions of how they bring their entire story together.
Component Structure
When it comes to creating the parts that designers can use without any delay in their processes and to the tokens and specifications that engineers are using to implement the resulting designs, components need to be built with consistent nomenclature, properties, and frameworks. This can come down to how the layer panel shapes out, or how variants are used to expand on the flexibility of any singular item.
Process
The design system is not limited to just a component library or a set of styles, but relies just as heavily on how an item navigates from an initial idea, gap, or need, to a set of design system elements and tokens to be exported to integration into the codebase repository. There needs to be a level of collaboration and buy in being led along a repeatable path to get from one end to the other.
Design Exploration & Prototyping
In developing the design system, there has been a ton of opportunity to explore new concepts, rebuild existing patterns in ways that improve upon the user experience, and inject positive change into the way we present our products to our customers.