Caracal Design Systems
Project
The Globe and Mail’s brand, through its design language, strongly communicates who we are and what we stand for. We’ve applied consistent use of the design language at every customer touchpoint. The result is that our customers feel a strong connection to the Globe brand, trust the content, and are confident within the user journey. It’s a continuous journey.
Challenges
The Globe and Mail’s pattern library in use since 2017 (internally known as Panther) was constructed with disassociated and add-on components. Lacking structured system cohesion and integration, components became redundant and variated making it difficult to manage.
Solutions
Broadening inputs to resolve the issue, I gathered and developed a multi-disciplinary team of designers, developers, and cross-functional stakeholder teams to audit areas of concern and led the implementation of a new, structured methodology resulting in a structured and sustainable new design systems, known as Caracal internally.
Caracal Design Systems allow teams across The Globe and Mail to design consistently, flexibly and innovate faster.
Design Process
Responsibility
As the design architect of Caracal, my summarized responsibilities included the successful proposal and adoption of the initial Caracal project plan to the executive team; implementation roadmap, stakeholder and working group identification and organization; and accountability for the design systems OKR plan.
Below are some key process including:
Pre-mortem with team members
Cross-functional team structure
High-level roadmap
Pre-mortem workshop
Categorize areas of improvement as a part of roadmap
Set up stakeholders from cross-function teams
High-level roadmap
UI Kit examples
Typography
Colours
Buttons