More designers are working on solving difficult problems for people in complex situations than ever before. New digital products are being created every day to help meet people's needs in areas like mental health, access to justice and public services.
However, digital product designers often find themselves reinventing the wheel when designing new interfaces and experiences. They regularly start from scratch on foundations like typography, spacing and good component design, even though established best practices exist. This leads to inconsistencies from one project to the next, and makes it harder for designers and developers to share a standard language and practice.
At Portable, we're solving this problem with "a design system for design systems" — a standardised set of user interface (UI) foundations and components exemplifying best practice usability and accessibility and grounded in research and evidence.
Not only is this toolkit helping our cross-disciplinary team design and build more effectively, we can now use our time and energy designing experiences for the real complex problems our users face.
In the spirit of sharing our practice, we're showcasing our UI kit in a live discussion with the team that built it.
What we'll cover
In this hour-long event, we’ll tell the story of the development of our UI kit, covering everything from the design of the toolkit itself, how we coded in developer handoff, to how to get a project like this set up in your organisation. We’ll also give a demonstration of the toolkit in action.
Some of the topics we’ll explore:
- “Selling in” the investment required internally to build a custom UI kit for your organisation
- How we’re designing UI foundations and components in line with best practice usability and accessibility
- Baking inclusive design principles into the foundations of the toolkit itself, so that accessibility isn’t the “afterthought” that it usually is
- The value of design systems in creating efficient workflows and effective user experiences
- Design tokens and how we use them
- The design-to-dev workflow
- The continuous improvement of the toolkit
Who it's for
This session is designed for:
- Designers or people in design-adjacent roles in organisations that work on building digital products, either for themselves or for clients
- UI designers and front-end developers
- People procuring digital design work in government or other organisations
Event details
Thursday 24th of June, 1-2pm
This event will be presented remotely as a Zoom webinar. A link to join the webinar will be provided to registered participants via email on Thursday 24th June.
After a 50 minute presentation, attendees will be invited to stay for a Q&A session with the panelists for the final 10 mins.
What if I can't make it?
You're in luck. This webinar will be recorded and published as a video on the Portable website at a later date.
If you cannot make Thursday's event but would like to know when this video goes live you can register for the “Send me the video” option in the registration section.
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