When we integrate content into design systems, we also boost the practice and progress of content design. We align content standards and frameworks more closely with design and development principles and operations. And we work better together and build more successful experiences.
In this workshop, we’ll explore this work—the ways content improves design, development, and delivery from the vantage point of the design system. Your organization already gets advantages from the design system; content design can amplify those advantages.
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to:
- Develop your style guide and use it as a touchstone for content in the design system.
- Use voice and tone guidelines throughout a design system.
- Publish documentation for the system’s varying audiences—designers, developers, product managers, and others.
- Write documentation for key parts of a design system: foundations, components, patterns, and more.
- Stay in touch with your users, internal and external.
- Collaborate with everyone (yes, everyone), especially designers and developers.
- Make sure your content and designs are useful, accessible, and inclusive.
- Plan and scope the work to keep it manageable.
- Track the work, celebrate successes, and keep going.
Well-crafted design principles can keep design and product teams moving confidently in the right direction through moments of ambiguity and change. They help clarify the vision, sharpen priorities, and scale thoughtful decision making. But who writes them? And how?
As experts in communication and design, content practitioners have the ideal skills to drive the creation of clear, actionable design principles. This workshop offers tools for transforming unspoken assumptions into powerful principles expressed through thoughtful language. The goal is to empower you to improve outcomes and expand your influence by focusing on the foundational words behind the design.
You’ll get hands-on practice and ready-to-use tactics to help you:
- Lead exercises to help your team identify core working principles.
- Distinguish between useful principles and vague platitudes.
- Express principles using crisp and memorable language.
- Craft a strategy for building alignment and getting approvals.
- Use principles as a tool for generating, prioritizing, and evaluating designs.
Meet your speaker
Meet your speakers
Michael Haggerty-Villa is the Director of Content Strategy at Teradata and a design systems advocate and manager. He has worked on design and systems for brands such as Compass, Disney, eBay, Intuit QuickBooks, and TurboTax. His articles about content in design systems have appeared in Content Science Review, UX Collective, and other sites. His content strategy clients include Blue Shield of California, HPE Software, Kaiser Permanente, Yellowpages.com, and others. Just to make sure he has no free time, he’s also a father to three children and four cats.
Michael Lawrence is a UX content designer with experience on product and brand design teams at Meta, Indeed, and eBay. He earned a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa, and served on the faculty of Columbia College Chicago before transitioning to a career in design. Michael recently returned to the classroom as adjunct faculty at the University of San Francisco.