Carta Design | August 2020 | Stanford, CA Initiative led by Liam Llorin. Contributors: John Hong, Kristina Inouye
Written by Kristina Inouye
When Carta Design began, we were a pair of undergrads who knew nothing about scalability. We focused on fast output with little regard for process.
A few months following inception, we lost 1 of our 2 founding designers, but added two new undergrads to the team. While onboarding, we soon realized that our system (or lack thereof) wouldn't last.
<aside> 💡 We needed to reinvent our processes and systems to withstand the high turnover of undergrad teams if we wanted to continually produce high quality work.
</aside>
We started with the issues that caused the most pain during onboarding and normal workflow. We found 3 big issues:
Before Reorganizing
After Reorganizing
Non-scalable Figma
No covers or dividers and little structure, so we had a tough time keeping track of our work and assets.
We adapted our new structure from Dropbox Design's Figma template and implemented a similar hierarchy but mirroring our process expectations.
We imagine one day we might outgrow this structure too (maybe we'll even need a real project instead of a file!), but for now, this works great
Additionally, since as students we mostly created Figma files for short-term school projects, we hadn't thought to establish a Design System. We (Liam especially) spent a lot of time researching systems, and created our current version (a work in progress, but much better), which I will discuss later.
Since early on we often skipped parts of the design process, we accumulated Dribbble-style UI unbacked by research and lacking in quality UX. We also had a collection of dissimilar screens since we had neglected to follow a visual language.
When we finished sorting through our assets, we discovered that there wasn't much we wanted to keep. Three months of work wasted due to lack of standardized process.