PalladiumNEXT

Overview/Goal

In an effort to be more customer-centric Gerdau was building product teams and focus areas within the organization, with an aim to remove customer friction. Palladium was created as our design system to provide functional consistency and stylistic expression.

Opportunity/Problem

To prevent the design system from being cast as an unnecessary constraint, we needed to start small and scale up. To position the system as an accelerator, where we could reduce the burden of decision making and provide ready-made core elements and components.

Process

Collecting all the inputs, new marketing materials, existing legacy work, industry best practices, lots of opinions and little time.

Making some fundamental decisions

• Typography as the foundation with comfortable scaling, to sizes and styles.
• Colors would be organized by hue and tint.
• Tables would be used as a organizational device with clear status.
• Data analogs would consolidate related data types.
• Interactive states would follow the color tints.

Experiment

Trust the math, because the system was mathematically constructed future items could be built in proper proportion, following a framework. This aided design decisions making them quicker and more accurate.

Formulas: to make the structure.
Sizing: that can be easily understood and applied.

Test

Design systems need used to be understood. The separation of style and structure meant the system provided the just right amount of consistency and variation to be compelling.

Seperation of concerns: customization with in a system.

Understanding

Creating a system which is flexible and predictable is critical, as is buy-in from the development items. Palladium is currently built into our react dev environments, ready to be used.

Integrated: into Dev environment.

Results

Over half of the scrum teams are using our Palladium system. It is a method for new projects to quickly come up to speed. The system creates a virtuous cycle between business needs, creativity and execution.