Production Design, and specifically Design System Management, has evolved to a curatorial role in many aspects. With tools like Sketch that allow for straight-to-code design, the polish happens in screen layouts rather than in redlines. Production Designers now build and curate the Design Systems that keep multiple teams and cross-platform projects on the same page.

For an example of a solid design system I worked on, I’ll dig into the Subway app. I was lead Production Designer, working with three junior PDs to keep the devs unblocked and the designers happy.

We were working with a team of five UI/UX designers, a content designer, a motion designer, an iOS dev and an Android team.

The Subway Design system covered both iOS and Android. We had assets ranging from simple one-color icons, to complicated illustrations layered and ready for animation, to cleaned up, clipped, and optimized photography. Everything was set up for 3x/xxhdpi for future-proofing purposes. We also needed to make adjustments mid-project to color and logos as the new system was being designed by their marketing partners after we started on the project.

Everything was built with as few plug-ins as possible to ensure the system would be more reliable if an untimely Sketch update broke the plug ins. Each assets was layered and named to take full advantage of the dropdown tools in Sketch to make iteration quick and easy.

Tools

This was, for the the studio, the first project we used Sketch exclusively for screen design. We paired that with Zeplin for dev-ready screens and assets. It worked like a charm. Due to the complexity of the icon illustration styles, we used Illustrator to create pixel-perfect icons and animation assets.

The Process

In the beginning, our PM would add to the list of screens for delivery and the Production Team would check those notes to make sure we weren’t doubling our efforts. The designers were designing for iOS 2x, so we had a bit of conversion from Points to DPs when necessary. I pushed out an Atomically-Designed design system that used many of the same assets for iOS and Android. A few times a day, we would have a production standup to check and verify updates and changes to the screens the designers needed.