What if the very system you invested in to create brand consistency and efficiency is now the biggest thing slowing down your digital transformation and costing you innovation?
Agility requires more than just speed; it demands a shared language and a foundational framework that allows teams to build, test, and innovate without being crushed by the weight of their own complexity.
This episode is brought to you by The Office of Experience, a design-driven, digital-first, vertically integrated and collaborative agency that believes in the power of ideas and the strength of people.
Today, we’re going to talk about design systems. But probably not in the way you’re used to thinking about them. We’re moving past the idea of a design system as just a rulebook or a library of components, and exploring how it can become a true catalyst for digital transformation—a tool that breaks down silos, accelerates business outcomes, and fundamentally changes how teams work together.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Nigel Dennis, Creative Director at The Office of Experience.
About Nigel Dennis
Nigel Dennis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nigelevandennis/
Resources
The Office of Experience: https://www.officeofexperience.com
This episode is brought to you by The Office of Experience, a design-driven, digital-first, vertically integrated and collaborative agency that believes in the power of ideas and the strength of people.
Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
What if the very system you invested in to create brand consistency and efficiency is now the biggest thing slowing down your digital transformation and costing you innovation? Agility requires more than just speed. It demands a shared language and a foundational framework that allows teams to build, test, and innovate without being crushed by the weight of their own complexity. This episode is brought to you by the Office of Experience, a design-driven, digital-first, vertically integrated, and collaborative agency that believes in the power of ideas and the strength of people. Today, we’re going to talk about design systems, but probably not in the way you’re used to thinking about them. We’re moving past the idea of a design system as just a rule book or a library of components and exploring how it can become a true catalyst for digital transformation, a tool that breaks down silos, accelerates business outcomes, and fundamentally changes how teams work together. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Nigel Dennis, Executive Creative Director at the Office of Experience.
Nigel, welcome to the show. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you before we dive in, though. Why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at the Office of Experience?
Nigel Dennis (00:56)
Hey Greg, thanks for having me.
Yeah, so I’ve been with the Office of Experience now for about two and a half years. Came in to help shape a lot of the digital practice ⁓ as far as creative goes and really strengthen this muscle of the team. I come from a very rich background. I’ve got 20 plus years in the overall creative industry. Started off as an illustrator working with lot of advertising agencies.
you working with art buyers back in the mid 2000s and things like that and have sort of very traditional background in that sense and pivoted to digital in early 2010s and started to explore what’s possible there. And I think that a lot of the kind of resourcefulness that I had to execute against or use at my disposal as a freelancer and as an illustrator has really kind of sharpened my mind and thinking about what’s possible from a design system standpoint and really exercising muscles that are kind of under the surface and just require a bit more strategic thinking than maybe I applied in my career in the past and maybe that some designers are applying right now.
Greg Kihlstrom (02:04)
Yeah. And, know, we’ve had several guests from the Office of Experience over the past few years. But for those that might not have caught one of those episodes, why don’t we talk a little bit about the Office of Experience and what specific problems do you solve for clients and who are the typical organizations that you’re working with?
Nigel Dennis (02:22)
Yeah, so we do a lot ⁓ in the B2B space, a lot of manufacturing distribution industries like that. But you know what I love about our team and what our real capability is, is being adaptable and being versatile. There’s no one problem with one solution for one business or the other. There’s nuance that deserves exploration and understanding. And I think our team is well adept at doing that and sort of digging beneath the surface and ultimately uncovering what is necessary, not just for these businesses, but for their customers and making sure that we really understand their intent and what drives them. I think intent and understanding intent is kind of the name of the game for all things today’s episode, honestly. And I think that the Office of Experience is really a special group of people that is willing to go above and beyond. There’s so many industries and so many agencies.
Ultimately, they kind of look at challenges and balk at them or step away and say that’s not in our wheelhouse or that’s not in our expertise. We have a team that is willing to create specialty amongst itself and people are willing to stand up, be adaptable, understand that opportunity and really capitalize and create new expertise. So we’re really growing with industry. We’re growing with what comes to us. And instead of saying no, we are building skill set and we are building expertise over time.
Greg Kihlstrom (03:44)
Yeah, love it. Well, yeah, let’s dive in then. And, you know, I to start from the the strategic standpoint here and go back to something that I said in the intro is, you know, just kind of rethinking and redefining what design systems really are. And so you’ve argued that most design systems are built on a flawed premise. What is that fundamental misunderstanding and what are the hidden costs for businesses that are getting it wrong?
Nigel Dennis (04:10)
Yeah, mean, I think that foundation is the thing. And starting from a strong foundation, often, you know, we kind of look at a design system as an extraction or kind of an expansion on existing brand guidelines. The irony is that sometimes in most brand guidelines, the digital guidelines or digital parts of those brand guidelines are an afterthought. And sometimes we kind of accept that afterthought and kind of paint by numbers and make sure that we’re least we’re accounting for fonts, we’re accounting for colors, for logos. And we’ve got a foundation kind of at its basic sort of definition, but we add other layers of logic. We account for growth and scale. know, there’s a lot of clients we work with, there’s the utopia of having a system that can support them for five years, 10 years.
Those things are possible, but we’ve got to think about them a little bit differently and be flexible and really build those foundations out to be more meaningful than they really are right now. So going beyond the sort of superficial and what we can see in front of us and preparing for that scale over time is ultimately the goal.
Greg Kihlstrom (05:14)
Yeah, yeah. And so to do that, you’ve talked about three mental shifts that need to happen. moving from constraint to enablement. Can you walk us through those shifts and why they’re so critical for unlocking the real potential of the design system?
Nigel Dennis (05:30)
Yeah, for constraint enablement, know, the the idea there is is we often look at a set of rules and say, no, we can’t do that or or no, the system doesn’t allow for that. There are more than enough tools at our disposal to say anything is possible. think enabling our teams to have greater understanding of intent for the designs for our teams to I’m going to touch on this a little bit later, but for creative teams to think like engineers, really understanding what
feasibility looks like and challenging the norm or the expectation for what that feasibility can get us in its current state and really creating an environment where people can thrive and build out systems that are sustainable and strong. Ultimately, my goal as a leader is to create pathways for people to succeed instead of trying to work through them and encouraging resourcefulness, encouraging teams to explore what’s possible, thinking about the rigor that needs to go into a system peel the onion or pull the thread, whichever analogy you want to use, and a bunch more show up. But it’s really being unafraid of that and enabling an environment and creating an environment where people can explore and challenge those norms and come to a shared understanding and a shared vision a bit more appropriately.
Greg Kihlstrom (06:42)
Yeah. And you mentioned getting designers to think more like engineers and maybe vice versa even, you know, in your experience, what’s the biggest barrier to doing that, you know, to creating kind of this, this cross-functional fluency and, how might someone start down that path?
Nigel Dennis (06:58)
Yeah, think it’s ultimately it’s going to sound really reductive and really simple, but I think it’s vision and shared vision. You know, at the end of the day, our name is going on everything and controlling the things that we can control and creating a pathway for us to be successful together. I think, you know, an engineer to understand the intent, the UX intent of a component or a module or a feature on a site.
getting a, or an app, whatever the digital solution might be, or getting a designer to think around engineering constraints. You know, we live in an era where vibe coding makes almost anything possible, at least at a prototype phase, but it really forcing our designers to kind of get in the shoes of the engineer and really be empathetic to what they’re up against or what they may, might be trying to accomplish on their end, right? There’s constraints that we might not be aware of as designers.
You know, I’ve worked with creatives in the past who had difficulty kind of sharing a vision on our own side of the fence. And oftentimes the greatest solution is going to get a beer with somebody and understanding what makes them tick. you know, the vision, think is, again, it sounds incredibly simple, but I think it is a big glaring gap in a lot of teams and internal at agency level. There is a ⁓ lack of vision that can really get in the way in that shared vision, understanding what we’re all building, what we’re working against, and having that shared vision for the work is really the key.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:26)
Yeah, yeah. You’ve mentioned a few other concepts of intelligent foundations and token systems for those listening who may not, you know, either have run across those terms or may not be in the weeds. Technically, can you explain, you know, what those mean in simple terms and maybe give an example of how one small change can create a big impact?
Nigel Dennis (08:51)
Yeah, there’s a couple ways that we’ve been sort of watching these tools like Figma enhance their abilities over time. A lot of what Figma is doing is in reaction to code bases. So it is forcing us as designers to think like engineers. And what we’ve seen over time is we’ve gone from simple styles that have existed in cork and in design and kind of
repurposing a lot of those same principles for a digital world, those are really good. And we can kind of, again, have a digital articulation of those brand guidelines that has some governance built into it because there’s no ⁓ guessing. We’ve had those foundations. We’ve had them at our disposal for years. you know, the wonderful thing about the pivots that have been made around the technology, A, the fact that it’s all cloud-based and it’s web-based and we can work remotely and build these robust systems together as an enhancement.
But we’ve also got the idea of tokenization. ⁓ So tokenizing our styles and our approaches at a numeric level and a font family level, a color hex level, a mode level, right? So we can build these things intelligently across multiple breakpoints, all of those things. And when we have the concept and the ability to create primitive tokens in a tool like Figma,
That is where our brand exists. That’s where our typography exists, our core colors. In the semantic system, you give purpose to all of those colors. So essentially you’re creating rules for a primary brand color to exist only in these places. So when you’re building that component, you can say, okay, my CTA or button background, I assigned my brand color to that. It will always be that until I create another rule. My brand color changes from red to blue one day.
we decide to go through rebrand, whatever it might be. I’m only changing that in one place. And the second I change that one place, it cascades everywhere else I’ve applied it. So it sounds like a very simple concept and it’s not a novel one. This is something that exists for a lot of teams right now. But what we’ve encouraged our team at OX to do is build those intelligent foundations early. We are better designers when we work with a set of rules early.
It sounds like a nightmare for a lot of designers, but when we put constraint on creatives, we actually do pretty well. Sometimes the constraint is only a timeline, but when we put real constraint and rules around the elements that we’re working with, not the vision, pushing people to think beyond from a design perspective is always paramount. But when we’ve got the constraint and rigor behind the tokenization of our system, we create.
exponential possibility and making updates over time. So creating those flexible systems I talked about for years to come.
Greg Kihlstrom (11:31)
So let’s talk about how we measure success with this as well. traditionally, ⁓ success for a design system might be measured by adoption rates, brand consistency, things like that. Are there additional ways of measuring as well, like things related to business impact? And if so, what are the right KPIs and what’s the right approach to think about it?
Nigel Dennis (11:55)
Yeah, ultimately, the biggest benefit to this is speed to market is obviously the biggest impact point. Your team coming up with a new feature is no longer hindered or they’re no longer kneecapped by not having the flexibility of a design system to support that. You see it all the time. You see a brand ⁓ develop a new product feels wildly different than anything else in their their in their sort of portfolio. But you’re seeing companies like Coinbase, for example, start from a really strong foundation. So when they build out new versions of their wallets, whatever it might be, it feels cohesive, it feels coherent, and it feels connected to one single ecosystem. The other part of it is just sort of legacy understanding of the design system, right? You build these rules, you build this intelligence into the system you bring in new designers, you bring in new people on the team, there’s no longer weeks of onboarding, right? The intelligence is built into it. Of course, there’s understanding that’s gonna have to happen, but you build that intelligence into the system, there’s less guesswork. You’re building out that foundation for them to understand. there’s all measure of efficiency. I think that’s the name of the game here is being able to build a system that can scale over time across multiple products, whatever it might be, whatever vertical you decide to go in. You’re creating a living, breathing digital articulation of what your brand guidelines always should have been in practice. And you’re building them with the technology that you’ve got.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:25)
Yeah. And of course, a critical part of this also is getting started. Right. And so, you know, as we were prepping for the show, you outlined a four week framework to get started. Obviously, we don’t have time to go through all the whole thing, but also a reason to contact Office of Experience, of course. But we. Right. But why don’t you give us a sneak peek of like the week one playbook and who needs to be there and what is that?
Nigel Dennis (13:45)
We’re happy to walk you through it.
Yeah, mean, you know, the I’m a big believer in self-awareness and self-sufficiency and resourcefulness when it comes to being a designer. Being a self-starter sounds like a no-brainer. You hear it, you know, when you interview somebody, they seem like a self-starter. But what does that really mean in this context? I think it takes passion and vision as a as a sort of, ⁓ you know, leadership skill, identifying someone on the team.
who has a passion for this, who has potential, who has the right demeanor or conviction around this kind of ⁓ excellence in the work. Identifying someone who is already sort of has the inclination to want to see the success of a system like this. Empowering them to take lead, empowering them to form the idea and the plan in their own minds for success there, utilizing the tools, they’re an expert.
capitalizing on that and really giving them space to take ownership over the success of that system. The other side of that is finding an engineer who has the same shared passion. You’re seeing designers who are starting to nerd out and geek out over the organization of their design systems. And it’s a beautiful thing to watch. We’ve got everyone on our design team is doing it. And I am sitting back watching them work through these systems. And it’s really satisfying. It is finding someone on the engineering side.
that has that same shared passion, who has the desire to understand the design intent. I worked with a developer years ago, and this is not to knock engineers, but I worked with a developer years ago who was arguing for weeks over the color blue we were using on some designs. This is not at Office of Experience, by the way. This is another gig. Arguing for weeks over the color blue, and the real problem is kind of an inability to understand the vision and why it matters that we are doing what we are doing. There’s accessibility ramifications. There’s all kinds of things to consider. But I think creating that partnership is part of that initial starting point, right? Taking a look at sort of identifying the problem that exists for both of you as a designer and as an engineer. Say, this is what I’m up against as a designer. This is what I would love to see change and the success I’d love to see. And then the same for the engineer. It’s a very empathetic kind of symbiotic relationship where your success is predicated on the other. And that’s kind of a great leadership position too, depending on those that you need to because you have the self-awareness that, I need to get this over the finish line. I can’t do this on my own. How do I empower that person to have the same shared vision as me? in the same way we created writer and designer partnerships, you know, back in the day, traditional agency model, we need to be doing the same with engineers and as creatives kind of reaching across the aisle, making sure that we have that shared vision. But it’s identifying, the first step is identifying those people who can be advocates, who can drive the team, who can drive the success around these ideas and make them happen. Implementation can come in many forms. It can start very small at a feature level, right? You take maybe one component of your system and kind of rectify it against these ideas. But it is really about finding the right team that’s passionate about seeing the success of the work like this.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:56)
Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, in addition to that, the you know, the another ultimate measure of success is a sustainable approach and something that that is able to handle complexity and growth and change. so maybe taking a look at a complex area, one one that Office of Experience works in quite a bit B2B e-commerce, you know, intricate product catalogs, varied user roles all of the above and more, you know, how does a how does a modern flexible design system help a brand in a space like that stay competitive and and kind of outmaneuver other competitors who are stuck with a more rigid approach?
Nigel Dennis (17:38)
Yeah, it’s a great question. think the good news and the interesting news about it is it turns out people like using the internet in a singular way. So, you know, the idea of a B2C versus B2B experience, that line is incredibly blurred. You know, anecdotally, we were sharing some work internally a couple weeks ago, and a colleague of mine leaned over and said, this doesn’t feel like B2B. And that’s because it shouldn’t.
You know, it should feel like it has the same flexibility and elegance of any other experience you encounter day in and day out, whether it be an app or a shopping experience or just brochure wear. We live in an era where we know more about the behaviors of every audience, honestly, to say that the best practices have shifted. We’ve worked with very robust ecosystems and
and brand and product architecture that seems to be endless, know, endless skews, endless product numbers, no imagery, you know, there’s all kinds of things that show up. How do you take an experience like that and make it beautiful? We do it by creating the sort of smart foundations I’m talking about. And we create it in a way that these companies in a B2B environment, they don’t want to spend a bunch of money, you know, redesigning their website every three, four or five years, a lot of them come to us and say, Hey,
We have a new website we paid to get done two years ago and we hate it. We can’t build anything on it. We don’t want to create a situation where the designs and the design systems that we create are creating that same hindrance. And so you work with those complex systems, you work with the complex needs of a growing business especially. They decide to go into a different vertical. Can our design system support any number of variables? And the answer is yes, because we are building them in such an intelligent and robust way.
That is honestly one of the more satisfying things is when we work through these design systems, we look at the variables, we look at the challenges and our ability to meet them through, I wouldn’t say minimal effort, but a bit more of a streamlined effort because our foundations are so strong. We’re able to add features pretty seamlessly.
Greg Kihlstrom (19:44)
Yeah, yeah. So as as we wrap up here, if we were to have this interview one year from today, what would we definitely be talking about?
Nigel Dennis (19:53)
man, well, we’d be talking about how we can, as designers, start to take these design systems and actually implement them in a vibe coding environment. There’s so many tools now, especially within Figma. Figma make our ability to connect the design system we’ve created against an idea and build something out. I think it’s very exciting. It’s, again, bridging the gap between design and engineering.
I think in a year from now, you’re going to start to see, you know, with tools like Framer, tools like Figma, Webflow, you’re seeing these, there’s sort of a pendulum that they all swing on and different varying degrees of expertise that require you to work with the tool. What you’re starting to see is kind of a blending of that and you’re, creating designers who understand how to build functional websites. And I think that bridging that gap is ultimately powerful. But I think you’re going to start to see, you know, we get a lot of portfolios in for interviews that say that they’re a specific type of designer. think you’re going to start to see designer slash engineer show up in a lot of these roles, which is my dream. You know, someone who can do both. But I think that’s what we’re going to start to see is the specialist, the sort of specialized designer or the generalist maybe that has their hands in a lot of different things. I think you’re going to start to see engineering or some level of it.
very least CSS understanding start to show up over time. But I’m very excited about that future, personally.
Greg Kihlstrom (21:18)
Nice. Well, Nigel, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Nigel Dennis (21:27)
Yeah, I mean, I think the the best way to stay agile is to assume I know nothing. And, you know, I think that going in with the obviously the the level of expertise that I’ve been able to sharpen over the years, it’s made me the the creative leader that I am now, bringing that to every problem and bringing that sort of instinct that, you know, there’s a gut feeling at a certain point that starts to exist as you get further on in your career, having led teams of, you know, 100 plus people.
in the past, bringing that instinct and that gut feeling to the problems that I don’t know how to solve in the room and waiting for people who are much smarter than me, guide me and help me get to that result and leaning on my creative instincts to get there. But that’s how I stay agile. I stay agile by empowering those around me to be successful. You know, it’s often the best place to be when you’re the last person in the room to talk, you know, and just kind of letting people letting people drive the conversation and creating leaders of people around you.
