Dan Mall: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice – Episode 169

Content Strategy Insights

Dan Mall The basics of building a design system are fairly simple. Ensconcing a system in an organization's culture so that it's actually adopted and used is a more complex undertaking. Dan Mall takes a content-first approach as he helps organizations evolve their design systems from projects to products and ultimately to firmly embedded practices that let teams deliver the efficiency and consistency benefits that such systems offer. We talked about: his Design System University an overview of the professional challenges that come with building and running a design system his new book Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice his addition to the conventional list of design-system benefits - in addition to efficiency and consistency - relief the tragically common story of how design systems can end up becoming "ghost towns and graveyards" how to ensconce good design-system ideas and practices in company culture how you can benefit by adopting a humble attitude toward design-system work how good design systems evolve from a project to a product and ultimately to a practice focus the importance of repetition in design system messaging strategy the crucial role of content in design systems how, when he teaches design-system process, he always starts with plain, unadorned text how design systems make it possible to quickly iterate on possible ways to present content to users how new technologies and practices like headless CMSs and microservices-based architectures work with design systems his thoughts on content orchestration and experience orchestration how AI fits into the design-system world the importance of having a vision for your design system, but to also appreciate and embrace detours and serendipity along with way Dan's bio Dan Mall is a husband, dad, teacher, creative director, designer, founder, and entrepreneur from Philly. He runs Design System University, where he creates, collects, and curates curriculum, content, and community to help enterprise teams design at scale. Previously, Dan ran design system consultancy SuperFriendly for over a decade. Dan writes about design systems, process, and leadership and other issues on his site danmall.com and in his weekly newsletter. Connect with Dan online Twitter Instagram Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/fxyQV8zKF4Q Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 169. The basic idea of a design system is simple enough to grasp and easy enough to prototype, but turning a collection of components and design guidance into a coherent system that people actually use - that's a whole other story. Dan Mall helps organizations embed design systems in their organizational culture so that designers, engineers, and product folks can efficiently and consistently deliver excellent experiences, always starting with content concerns at the forefront. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 169 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really excited today to have with us Dan Mall. Dan is like, if you google design systems, his name pretty much comes up, I think, and part of it, and what he does nowadays is he, he's the founder and runs the Design System University. So welcome, Dan. Tell the folks a little bit more about what's cooking there at Design System U. Dan: Yeah, awesome. Thank you, Larry. Thank you for having me. Design System U is a place where people can get support and content and community around designing at scale. That's something that I think a lot of us as designers and engineers and content folks and all those things, we just don't get training in that kind of stuff. Dan: And so I wanted to create something that allowed people to have some support and community and content and training to really work at scale when we make digital tools and we mak...