Case study: A design system that evolves like a language
The challenge

Design for daily use

Paytm Insider is rapidly scaling and evolving as a business, from its history in live event ticketing, to movies, sports and interactive video and games.

For marketing, we wanted the large amount of daily work producing banners and emailers to be simplified, with improved consistency — empower all levels of designers to produce work that fits the brand well and is ready for release with minimal oversight.

For product, we wanted to reduce decision making around font sizing, margins, etc. to improve consistency across apps and create a shared language between design and development. Give both team building blocks for prototyping new features or updating older parts of the app.

Fast learns, slow remembers

Pace layers divide types of design work by their resistance to change

From the beginning, we wanted to make sure the system was ready for change. Big decisions like brand colours and fonts might remain more fixed, while fast moving components like ads and new features would need to be nimble enough to experiement and set new standards.

Borrowing from architect Frank Duffy’s ideas about the layers of a building, we divided design work into the pace at which they were likely to change. Deeper layers change slowly and need more consideration while higher levels change with the season and can be trendy.

Moving the centre needs more effort and involves more stakeholders since it forces everything around it to change as well

Core branding

Design can be broken into grammar (colours, fonts) and vocabulary (components, modules)

Rather than start with a set of use cases, we wanted to give ourselves rules to work with. The core layer then is a system, not a library, and can be used to handle any new case thrown at it.

We worked with our branding agency to develop the basic building blocks: a colour palette, fonts and patterns that can be combined in a variety of ways.
['Ashim D Silva']
['Case Study', 'UI Design', 'User Experience', 'Design Language', 'Design Systems']