Cardinal Design System
Cardinal Design System is a single source of truth for digital design at Transamerica.
It is an ever-evolving product, providing framework agnostic components, patterns, usage, styles and code to align the design and development of our digital products.
The deliverable is a central repository of reusable components, principles and rules.
Role & Contribution
As the Design Lead, I am responsible for contributing to and maintaining the backlog of elements. As we are operating using an atomic model for our design system, an immense of research goes into determining the need for elements and components across our 5 digital products (and counting). I manage four designers and lay the foundation of element needs, classification (style, pattern, structure, etc), and specifications as they may differ across our products, as well as whether or not the element will be pre or post-login. Much of my work involves: listening to the needs of our digital products pods, identifying gaps and needs for alignment, running audits and testing, designing processes and strategies for contributions, and the evangelizing and governance of the design system at a company-wide level.
A Federated Model
Cardinal Design System started as central Pod with a Product Owner, Scrum Master, a Design Lead, 2 Designers, 2 FE Developers, and a Copywriter. However, the structure underwent some changes and is now operating as an open-source/federated model. This has shifted my role as I, and our contributing Guild Designers, take on much more in additional to our other roles at the company. We understand the great amount of work and responsibility on our plates, but we see Cardinal as a valuable tool that we should upkeep. Also, there is so much joy in this process of defining a design system for a company and I take great pride in continuing this work for the benefit of others.
“Stephanie has [also] ensured that Cardinal will continue to live on in a guild manor, as the enthusiastic leader of the guild. Under Stephanie’s leadership, the guild continues to contribute to Cardinal by chipping away at the extensive backlog. While there is a misnomer in the organization that Cardinal is ‘dead,’ we know that it is alive and growing and will continue to benefit the organization indefinitely.”
