Web Directions Product 2020

Session Details

Guardrails or handcuffs? Building creative and sustainable design systems

Mark Boulton design director, writer, and speaker

The holy grail for design systems is akin to designing a game like chess or football: Create a system with simple, understandable and communicable rules that empower creative freedom and expression with limitless possibility.

Modern digital design systems take a different path: create modular, reusable components so we can quickly build on-brand products at scale.

The latter is always sold with the promise of the former.

In this talk, Mark will outline his approach to building design system products and teams that acknowledge the tensions that exist between the need to scale and the need to differentiate.

Mark Boulton

Mark is a designer who’s been building design systems for the past twenty years, either in-house building and leading delivery teams, or running his design agency.

Until recently, Mark was Head of Digital at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) where he led a team building a design system for life sciences, and trying to figure out how to scale design in a scientific environment where the bottom line was discovery not dollars. Prior to working at EMBL, Mark was Design Director at Monotype where he led scaling of a new design system across the company’s portfolio of products. Previously Mark ran a design studio working on design systems for CERN, Al Jazeera, and ESPN.

Mark lives in Wales with his wife, two daughters and a dog that thinks it’s a bear.

Don't miss your chance to see Mark Boulton and many other inspiring speakers at Product://Remote.

Tickets start at $195, for two in-depth days with the world's leading product professionals.

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