Atlas Design System

In late 2017, I began leading efforts for our Patterns & Standards team. Before, we were mainly focused on maintaining and implementing new ideas (at a very slow pace). All of that is great, but I saw an opportunity to become more of a design system that fully functions throughout all parts of the company.

In order to become more systematic, I organized an entire audit of Sears and Kmart platforms. This was no small task, but it was achievable with the help of others. We were able to identify where certain patterns were used correctly & incorrectly or inconsistently, retire unused patterns, and enhance the existing component library.

Our biggest challenge was the lack of resources, and that is why I built a business case to get the dedicated resources we needed to be successful and accomplish a stable building environment across all platforms. I used Sketch to build a robust library file and used InVision’s Design System Manager to help control versions as patterns evolved.

In the conception phase of our design system, I was leading our team in all sorts of exercises to develop a name and brand for our design system, ATLAS. To come up with our name, we wrote as many ideas on post-it notes as we could in 10 minutes. We came up with something like 80+ names. Then we asked random people from our office to come and vote on their top-5 favorite names using dot stickers. We narrowed it down to the top-10 names and we repeated the voting process narrowing it down to the top-5 names. Then I sent out a company wide survey to vote on our design system’s name and Atlas was born.

I held weekly Pattern alignment meetings to keep everyone up to date on processes, new documentation, evangelize efforts, and published a monthly newsletter. Check out some of the work our team did in the gallery below.

The illustration credit goes to Bridget Polacheck, but the name, slogans, values, and direction were a strong team effort. In a design system it is also important to get everyone speaking a common language, and that’s why I worked with developers to audit our component’s taxonomy and align our naming conventions across our design files and dev guides. Take a peek at the Atlas taxonomy worksheet. It was a fun information architecture exorcise for myself, and a huge improvement to our design workflow.