“Scenario-Driven Design Systems” by Yesenia Perez-Cruz—An Event Apart video

Design systems aren’t new, but they’ve become incredibly popular in the past few years. They’re essential to building, maintaining, scaling, and evolving our sites and products, but creating a unified system that scales to serve a variety of content and use cases can be challenging. In this hour-long talk filmed live at AEA Orlando 2018, Yesenia Perez-Cruz shares insights from her experience creating a unified design system for eight media brands with eight distinct editorial strategies. See how to approach a design system via a user-centered lens, and learn how being scenario-driven helps you create a scalable design system that responds flexibly to specific contexts.

Yesenia Perez-Cruz is a design director at Vox Media, where she works on the on-platform user experience and design system of The Verge, Vox, SB Nation, Eater, Polygon, Racked, Curbed, and Recode. Earlier in her storied career, she created beautiful, functional design systems for clients like MTV, BBVA Compass, Papa John’s, and Harvard University while at Happy Cog and Intuitive Company, and helped clients improve site performance via asset budgets.

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