David Aerne

Designing Systems

It seems like every day a new design system is unleashed on the web. Every major online competitor has their own version, and many of them are masterworks.

But unless you expect your design system to be mainly a branding tool, it’s only as good as the efficiency it brings to the product team: how well does it bridge the gap between design and development? In this talk, I’ll share some of the best practices and custom tools I’ve developed while building and implementing token-based design systems over the past 10 years for some of Switzerland’s largest companies. We’ll explore some of the nuances that distinguish style guides and design systems. We’ll see how we can fashion design tokens that act as a Rosetta Stone between designers and developers, creating not just a common language, but a common way to think about the visual aspects of our product. And finally we’ll look at some of my favorite ways to let generative and creative-coding techniques into the process as a collaborator.