Dave House is a product designer helping BT develop a design system that can help our developers and design team work more efficiently and consistently.
We’ve formed a new team in BT Consumer Digital to create a single design system for our three consumer-facing brands — BT, EE and Plusnet. We hope to create something that truly brings the many different disciplines within a product squad together and increases the focus on their unique goals by solving common patterns and problems once.
Working on a multi-brand design system team forces you to make important distinctions between what makes a meaningful, robust system and what's needed to retain the essence and style of each unique brand.
We’ll be blogging more about the design system as it…
Why I think design systems actually have more in common with an automotive assembly line than a graphics standards manual
There are two sides to the world of design systems.
One side leans towards the systematisation of graphic design, UI design or a visual language. This is to create order, meaning and harmony across design assets and to provide rules to design any new material from. I look at this as an extension of a graphic standards manual or even a detailed brand guidelines document.
The other has more of a focus on design rationalisation, standardisation, delivery and adoption. For example, making common components reusable across a product line and creating detailed usage guidelines for the design and build process…
It doesn’t matter how good your design is if nobody waits around to see it.
The waiting is the hardest part
There are varying degrees of need or desire to access a website or service online. For example, accessing a government service is usually out of necessity, while visiting an expensive watch shop would usually be about desire.
The willingness for people to wait for an experience might include:
- If it’s something they have to do (pay car tax)
- If it’s something they know is worth it (best stock of vintage car parts in the country)
- If there is no other option (exclusive retailer on this limited edition vinyl record)
Common reasons for not waiting might include:
- There are plenty of…
Spacing your typography and components to avoid surprises in development.
I’ve worked in organisations large and small, agencies and in-house. One thing that’s been common everywhere is the designers’ shock at how spacing has been implemented to their designs in production.
“The spacing is all wrong” — Designer during QA process
First off, it could be that the frontend developers have established spacing units that are different to yours, they’re using a “closest” or “looks about right” approach but that’s not what I want to talk about today.
Sorry fellow designers, the most common reason for this I’ve found has been a problem with the design files or specs themselves.
…
I’ve worked in small and large organisations. I’ve been part of a centralised team of designers, worked embedded in a product team and also been the only designer of any kind in a large business.
Some organisations fully embrace user-centred design, with every member of the team, regardless of job title, feeling ownership of the users’ experience. Perhaps more commonly, a designer’s job is to advocate for users in companies where there is some kind of disconnect between the business and its customers. Put simply, to be the voice of the user.
Even the most user-centred organisation can become immune to or disconnected from users’ problems. Messages sent through support channels may not be getting to the right people, stories get boiled down to a single bug report without context, individuals can feel of helpless…
If you’ve bought yourself an old Beetle, Split, Bay, Karmann Ghia or even an aircooled Porche, the chances are you’re going to need to do a little bit of maintenance yourself.
The good news is that the type 1 upright engines are one of the easiest engines to work on. I’ve gone from having zero knowledge a few years back to being able to diagnose and fix most of the common problems myself, you can do it too!
For this article I’ll only be focusing on the top end of the engine as this is where the majority of DIY…
Back in the late 60s Gregory Sylvester “G. C.” Coleman, the drummer of Washington DC funk and soul band The Winstons recorded a drum interlude that changed the world.
The Winstons released the single ‘Color Him Father’ in 1969, however it was the 6 second long drum break on the b-side ‘Amen, brother’ that would later become the backdrop to thousands of tracks and define entire genre of music.
The break
The YouTube link below will drop you into ‘Amen, brother’ at 1:26. At the point of reading this you either already know what you’re going to hear or you don’t.
Using emoji to explain the principles of BEM
I’d heard the term Block Element Modifier (BEM) used by many of the frontend developers I’ve worked with over the years. It wasn’t until I started on my current project that I actually needed to understand what it was or what the benefits of using it might be. After hearing the same questions about CSS class names from users of the product I work on, I decided to create a short intro to BEM primarily aimed at designers, although I hope it helps anyone else that’s new to it.
What is BEM?
The BEM methodology is a way of naming CSS classes.
Following…
