The Challenge
When approaching a new project, it can be exciting to be able to start afresh, with no restraints, and let creativity flow. But when there are multiple designers working on the same product and deadlines approaching, it pays to have a unified system providing components and patterns which have already been refined and validated. This enables designers and developers to avoid repeating themselves, freeing them up to solve bigger problems and produce higher quality work.
Beamly’s product team started out with a small component library, created to help build websites for Coty’s beauty brands. As the company grew and multiple delivery teams adapted and implemented these components clients with different needs, the components diverged. This resulted in disparate, difficult to maintain sites, with features and behaviours functioning in different ways.
As we were already working on refining these components for the Atomic Beauty project, our team pitched the Design System as the most efficient way to organise and distribute designs, code and usage guidelines. This could then be expanded to incorporate other Beamly products.