Twitter
Role: Senior Product Designer, Design Systems
Timeline: January 2021 – January 2023
Project Overview
In Design Systems we accelerate product delivery across teams, ecosystems, and disciplines through ownership and maintenance of a set of unified components, patterns, guidelines, education, and tools, that preserve the visual quality and functional consistency across products.
At the end of 2020, Twitter updated its brands’ look and feel to reflect the spirit, energy, and magic of the platform.
Our goal was to create a sustainable, modern visual system that reinforced Twitter’s unique value proposition throughout the product.
My Contributions
When I joined Twitter in the beginning of 2021 we needed to create a more robust Figma component library with guidelines and documentation. I spearheaded the development and ownership of this library, collaborating with two other designers on the team. We updated the legacy components with the new design tokens and design techniques. We applied Auto Layout and simplified our variants and component structure.
I worked closely with the Client UI engineering teams to update the components on a component by component basis by making explorations, writing specs and set up meetings during the implementation process.
Projects
The old brand and design system
In research findings, customers mentioned that Twitter’s current visual language felt “boring”, “cluttered”, and “unfinished”. The current design was also lacking visual hierarchy.
The new design system
Modern, clean, bold, colorful, on brand. The documentation included principles, color, typography, and accessibility guidelines.
The new component library
Thousands of variants, all platforms (iOS, Android, Web), responsive, used by cross functional design teams, close collaboration with client UI teams (naming, interactions, etc.)