Developing a design environment

Avatar of Robin Rendle
Robin Rendle on

Jules Forrest discusses some of the work that her team at Credit Karma has been up to when it comes to design systems. Jules writes:

…in most engineering organizations, you spend your whole first day setting up your development environment so you can actually ship code. It’s generally pretty tedious and no one likes doing it, but it’s this thing you do to contribute meaningful work to production. Which got me thinking, what would it look like to make it easier for designers to design for production?

That’s what Jules calls a “design environment” and she’s even written a whole bunch of documentation in Thread, Credit Karma’s design system, for designers on their team to get that design environment up and running. That’s stuff like fonts, Sketch plugins, and other useful assets:

These problems have certainly been tackled by other teams in the past but this is the first time I’ve heard the phrase “design environment” before and I sort of love the heck out of it. Oh, and this post reminds me of a piece by Jon Gold where he wrote about Painting with Code.

Direct Link →