The Problem

Impartner had been suffering for years with inconsistencies throughout the entire product offering. No UI standards, no best practices in interaction design, and nothing to help speed up the process for designers and developers like a reusable component library. Impartner hired me to create and spearhead implementing a new design system that would serve as the foundation for all new product offerings and that would eventually help lead and support a company-wide refactoring of their current product.

The Solution

After following the work that Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger had created with their newest tailwindCSS project “TailwindUI”, I always felt that it would be a new and exciting way of handling a design system and component library. And given that Impartner was on a very tight deadline with an upcoming new product launch, I dove in and went for it.

As those who are famililar with the project, TailwindUI provides a lot of components out of the box and sort of offers an HTML only / bolt on your own javascript library of components. As I sorted through their offerings, I noticed that several of their components would need to be changed slightly for our needs at Impartner.

I embarked on the massive undertaking of create a sketch component library out of TailwindUI’s components and making small tweaks and adjustments here and there for our needs. One of the strengths of tailwindCSS is that it is a highly customizable and flexible framework and my adjustments were easily accomplished. TailwindCSS also works very well with Angular which many of our Front Ends were happy to see as we had been using Angular in our previous offering.

The Outcome

The final product of our design system was a large scale B2B SaaS product called "PX Studio" that is being sold now to companies and organizations nationwide. Most designers and developers know that quick and rapid iteration is one of the many benefits of having a well-implemented design system. Because our designers were able to quickly pull out components from a shared sketch library across our team, rapid prototyping is more easily accomplished now. What used to take days and weeks can now be accomplished in a matter of hours.