Gabrielle Mérite: Especially when we make guidelines that are going to be used potentially by
Gabrielle Mérite: hundreds of people, we have such a responsibility to do them properly.
Moritz Stefaner: Hi everyone, welcome to a new episode of Data Stories. My name is Moritz Stefano
Moritz Stefaner: and I'm an independent designer of data visualizations.
Moritz Stefaner: In fact, I work as a self-employed truth and beauty operator out of my office
Moritz Stefaner: here in the countryside in the north of Germany.
Moritz Stefaner: And usually I record this podcast together with Enrico Bertini,
Moritz Stefaner: who is a professor at Northeastern University in Boston. But today I'm solo.
Moritz Stefaner: But luckily I'm joined by two guests today, which you will hear about in a minute.
Moritz Stefaner: Just in terms of introductions, on this podcast, we talk about data visualization,
Moritz Stefaner: data analysis, and generally the role data plays in our lives.
Moritz Stefaner: The topic today is data design themes, design systems, style guides,
Moritz Stefaner: guidelines, design languages.
Moritz Stefaner: You can already see there's a whole cosmos of new formats emerging here in this
Moritz Stefaner: space that we want to explore together today. And hopefully you'll learn something new.
Moritz Stefaner: And it's an exciting new emerging field.
Moritz Stefaner: I hope we can shed a bit of light on these mysterious terms.
Moritz Stefaner: Before we dive right in, just a quick note, our podcast is listener supported.
Moritz Stefaner: We don't have any ads. So if you enjoy the show, you might consider supporting
Moritz Stefaner: us. You can do this with recurring payments on patreon.com slash data stories.
Moritz Stefaner: So then there's a little donation you do every time we publish an episode.
Moritz Stefaner: Or you could also send us one time donations on paypal.me slash data stories.
Moritz Stefaner: It's always much appreciated, also small amounts. It just keeps us going.
Moritz Stefaner: And we also have a bit of cost, so any contribution you can make is super appreciated.
Moritz Stefaner: If you don't have or don't want to do monetary support, you can also just support
Moritz Stefaner: us on social media or give us a good rating.
Moritz Stefaner: Anything helps. And if not, it's also fine. Just keep listening.
Moritz Stefaner: Anyways, let's get started.
Moritz Stefaner: Let's dive right in. And now I can reveal our guests. our guests today are Gabrielle and Alain. Hi.
Gabrielle Mérite: Hi, Moritz.
Moritz Stefaner: Hello. Thanks for joining me. Quick introduction. So Gabrielle,
Moritz Stefaner: can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah. Hi, I'm Gabrielle Merite. I'm French. I'm an independent information designer.
Gabrielle Mérite: So I help ethically driven organization uncover important truth and share stories
Gabrielle Mérite: with intention backed by data.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I'm also currently, for another month, the senior DeDeviz designer at Pentagram
Gabrielle Mérite: in the team of Georgia Alubi.
Moritz Stefaner: Which we also had on the show a few times and who's of course well known.
Moritz Stefaner: And yeah, it's exciting to see you two work together.
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, the incredible Georgia.
Moritz Stefaner: Ellen, how about you?
Alan Wilson: Yeah, I'm Alan Wilson. I'm a principal designer at Adobe.
Alan Wilson: Where I work primarily on the experience cloud, which is Adobe's enterprise
Alan Wilson: business. We make marketing software and other tools to help large organizations
Alan Wilson: keep their messaging and help their customers.
Alan Wilson: And I guess the main thing that we'll be discussing today is my contributions
Alan Wilson: to the design system at Adobe, which is called Spectrum. Right.
Moritz Stefaner: Yes. And this is also how we got in touch around two years ago because I started
Moritz Stefaner: working together with Core, an agency in the UK on a design system for the World Health Organization.
Moritz Stefaner: And yeah, and we sort of uncovered this whole world of wow, there's so much
Moritz Stefaner: happening in this space.
Moritz Stefaner: And it's also really hard to orient yourself. Like it sounds so easy if somebody
Moritz Stefaner: says, oh, we need some database style guide or guidelines.
Moritz Stefaner: Can you help us do that? You know, everybody's like, yeah, sure,
Moritz Stefaner: that sounds great. And then once you look into, oh, what do we do?
Moritz Stefaner: What do we actually do now? What do we offer? What's the format?
Moritz Stefaner: What's the scope of the whole project? You realize, oh, it's not even that clear.
Moritz Stefaner: And everybody needs to figure out what they're doing in that space.
Moritz Stefaner: And so, yeah, so there's so many flavors and approaches you can do.
Moritz Stefaner: And so, yeah, I got in touch with you, Alan, and a few other folks who have
Moritz Stefaner: experience in the field to help us guide along a bit. And here we are.
Moritz Stefaner: So I know both of you have been working on these types of projects.
Moritz Stefaner: So before we go into all the nuances, what the differences between different
Moritz Stefaner: subgenres are, maybe we can start with the purpose.
Moritz Stefaner: What, in your experience, do people hope to achieve when they start building
Moritz Stefaner: a design style guide or start formulating design guidelines?
Moritz Stefaner: Building a design style guide or start formulating design guidelines.
Moritz Stefaner: What do you think? What's the hope connected to that? Or what's the value to
Moritz Stefaner: an organization to have something like that?
Alan Wilson: I guess I'll go first. I think the main value is answering questions, right?
Alan Wilson: As organizations grow, you have to coordinate a lot more to make sure that you
Alan Wilson: as a group have a coordinated voice.
Alan Wilson: Space. Questions are very common, right? What font should I use?
Alan Wilson: What are our standard colors?
Alan Wilson: How do we lay out this particular document type?
Alan Wilson: People need standards to communicate in a unified way.
Alan Wilson: One of the things I like about this space is there's just such a broad range
Alan Wilson: as you already touched on of ways to answer those questions.
Alan Wilson: But for me, it's all about.
Alan Wilson: Helping people do their jobs more effectively and efficiently by answering questions
Alan Wilson: that they have a difficult time answering on their own.
Moritz Stefaner: Mm-hmm.
Gabrielle Mérite: I love that answer.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, that seems pretty comprehensive already.
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, I had a way more like strict like dot list. Yeah.
Gabrielle Mérite: But I love that answer of answering question because I think it answers a lot on the definition.
Gabrielle Mérite: I see, on mine, I kind of see like four kind of point of values.
Gabrielle Mérite: Efficiency, just the idea of answering questions faster.
Gabrielle Mérite: So just people being able to reuse design to know what to do.
Gabrielle Mérite: All these things come into efficiency.
Gabrielle Mérite: Consistency, which I think is the one that people don't always see.
Gabrielle Mérite: But for an organization, being able to reproduce a design over and over or reuse
Gabrielle Mérite: some time of... set of rules and principle that they can build upon, scale.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I think Alan is going to know that more than me.
Gabrielle Mérite: And then the one that I don't see often, but to add pentagram in my work that's
Gabrielle Mérite: been pretty important, which is recognizability.
Gabrielle Mérite: So in those guidelines in Style Guide, the idea of being able to produce something
Gabrielle Mérite: that is recognized by an audience, like brand them.
Gabrielle Mérite: And we don't talk about that often in data viz, but that's really important
Gabrielle Mérite: to me when creating style guides.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah. Yeah. And in the like more branding and PR and advertising world,
Moritz Stefaner: brand guidelines are super common, right?
Moritz Stefaner: And often we just receive them as, oh, here are our brand guidelines.
Moritz Stefaner: Can you make sure the charts, you know, fit into that?
Moritz Stefaner: Right. And so, yeah, that's already where we touch these wider like communication
Moritz Stefaner: contexts. But in this world, it's very common to have like a big book with the
Moritz Stefaner: fonts we use, these are the colors we have. This is how we pick photos.
Moritz Stefaner: You don't crop photos like this, you crop them like that and so on.
Moritz Stefaner: And yeah, I think in database it's a bit more new that we would,
Moritz Stefaner: be so explicit about this is our approach, right? Yeah.
Alan Wilson: I think one of the reasons data is emerging more and more in the style guide
Alan Wilson: space is because people are using it more and they have more questions about it.
Alan Wilson: So we're traditionally style guides focused on how you use the logo and how
Alan Wilson: you use photography and other visuals to communicate.
Alan Wilson: People are using charts to communicate and they have questions about how to best do that.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a natural evolution of us actually mattering, which is good.
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, precisely. And there's this idea of like, you know, authority.
Gabrielle Mérite: I think in the world where trust is hard to gain, for organizations that have
Gabrielle Mérite: gained that trust or are trying to gain that trust, having that recognizability
Gabrielle Mérite: of like, oh, this specific data visualization is coming from this institution that I'm familiar with.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I can recognize that a very first look seems really important.
Gabrielle Mérite: In the public discourse.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah. Cool. So I think we have the motivation is clear.
Moritz Stefaner: So you want consistency, you want a scale design, you want to make sure all
Moritz Stefaner: outputs coming from one source have a minimum level of quality,
Moritz Stefaner: they're recognizable, they look from the same family at least.
Moritz Stefaner: And not have to be a mysterious process process that some gifted rock star designers
Moritz Stefaner: can only do, but sort of scale the capability to anybody.
Moritz Stefaner: Ideally, right, that, oh, with the right ruleset and the right tools and the
Moritz Stefaner: right building blocks, anybody can now make a chart that looks like coming from
Moritz Stefaner: that organization and is solid.
Moritz Stefaner: That's the hope. It's a big goal, of course. But now we're looking into,
Moritz Stefaner: okay, how can we enable that?
Moritz Stefaner: What are the things we can supply? And this is super crucial to be clear about that.
Moritz Stefaner: That's a trap I ran into in a few projects that we weren't really clear what
Moritz Stefaner: the difference is between a style guide or a guidelines or a component system.
Moritz Stefaner: System. I like all these things. And then you realize, oh, they actually wanted
Moritz Stefaner: to have a big book with lots of data with do's and don'ts.
Moritz Stefaner: And we were like, oh, we thought we're just designing a database theme,
Moritz Stefaner: like pick some colors, right.
Moritz Stefaner: And so there's a whole spectrum of possible outputs you can have, right.
Moritz Stefaner: And maybe let's talk about a few of them.
Moritz Stefaner: And I try to organize it from small to big. So I think the smallest thing is
Moritz Stefaner: probably like a design theme, where you say like, these are the colors and fonts
Moritz Stefaner: you can use for a given charge or something like this.
Moritz Stefaner: And maybe a brand has multiple themes like a light theme and a dark theme.
Moritz Stefaner: It's like a skin you can apply to a chart like an Excel template type thing maybe.
Moritz Stefaner: Then the next step is maybe a design system. Alan, is Spectrum a design system?
Moritz Stefaner: Where's Spectrum on that ladder?
Alan Wilson: Yeah, Spectrum is a design system and I would put it further down,
Alan Wilson: maybe even at the very bottom.
Gabrielle Mérite: At the bottom. I'm also in the bottom.
Alan Wilson: Yeah.
Alan Wilson: When I think design system, I think the difference between
Alan Wilson: a design system and a style guide or a theme
Alan Wilson: or just a set of guidelines is a design system has infrastructure behind it
Alan Wilson: So that when you make a change those changes roll out into all the places that
Alan Wilson: they need to maybe there's also software components that exactly implement that stuff and Yeah,
Alan Wilson: yeah And it provides resources for all parties that are involved.
Alan Wilson: So the designers get the design assets they need,
Alan Wilson: the engineers have the engineering components that they're going to use,
Alan Wilson: and anyone else in the organization has the guidelines and materials,
Alan Wilson: templates, things they need to do their work.
Moritz Stefaner: And so, okay, cool. So we have design themes, automated in the design system,
Moritz Stefaner: and super well documented.
Moritz Stefaner: So then how about guidelines and style guides?
Gabrielle Mérite: How does that fit in? I don't know how Alan feels about it to me.
Gabrielle Mérite: So I work hard on that one. I was like, is there a difference between guidelines and style guides?
Gabrielle Mérite: And I think we use it pretty freely in the design world.
Gabrielle Mérite: It kind of, we use it, at least in the, you know, bright side of things,
Gabrielle Mérite: we use it kind of like whatever, we can exchange them.
Gabrielle Mérite: However, I could see a difference where for me, like one guideline could be
Gabrielle Mérite: like do and don'ts versus a style guide is kind of putting all those guidelines together.
Gabrielle Mérite: So to me, style guide is a collection of rule. You know, it tells you what you're
Gabrielle Mérite: allowed to do and not to do given a context.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I guess I'm going to go one step further, but there's to me,
Gabrielle Mérite: the style guide, if you think about, if you remove style and you just keep guide,
Gabrielle Mérite: then you can also include elements of voice again, to that branding element.
Gabrielle Mérite: So not just doing dance on design, on color choices, but yes,
Gabrielle Mérite: on tonality, on content, on way
Gabrielle Mérite: more than just the look and feel and the practicality of design elements.
Gabrielle Mérite: So that's how I see the difference in guideline and style guides,
Gabrielle Mérite: but in the design world, we definitely use them almost as exchangeable.
Moritz Stefaner: And that part cannot be automated or implemented well in software,
Moritz Stefaner: right? Like, how do you automate tonality?
Moritz Stefaner: Can you? I don't know. But at least, let's say, a style guide or design guidelines
Moritz Stefaner: are usually targeted at people making charts. Right? Is that fair to say?
Alan Wilson: I mean, I think all of these are targeted at people making charts.
Alan Wilson: But to Gabriel's point, some focus more on the aesthetic part of the problems
Alan Wilson: and the aesthetic questions.
Alan Wilson: And others focus on the technical questions and implementations and things and
Alan Wilson: systemize things a bit more.
Moritz Stefaner: More.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, so you can see already, it's this muddy mess of people,
Moritz Stefaner: machines, data, audiences.
Moritz Stefaner: It's an exciting space. And then really think about, okay, how can we abstract
Moritz Stefaner: principles there and re-covering rules and not just solve problems once,
Moritz Stefaner: but more or less for once and all, which is of course the hard part.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's funny because it reminds me of what Alan was saying about the design system.
Gabrielle Mérite: So at least just like Alain had placed it at the end, to me it's what encompasses
Gabrielle Mérite: everything, including Style Guide, but also design theme, design language,
Gabrielle Mérite: like the actual components and little design elements, like templates that you may have created.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I would call it a repository of institutional knowledge that solves problems,
Gabrielle Mérite: that keeps happening. Like that's how I would define it probably without even
Gabrielle Mérite: putting like what it is inside.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's just a big, big, big repository and it can be flexible depending on your institution.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, right.
Alan Wilson: Yeah. I think another thing worth calling out is that sometimes data visualization is its own thing.
Alan Wilson: There is a datavis style guide, and it lives up separate from the brand guide
Alan Wilson: and the user interface guidelines and other resources.
Alan Wilson: But more and more, we're seeing all three of those things. And other things as well come to,
Alan Wilson: content guidelines in important ways that we need to account for.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah. Yeah.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, so there's a lot of overlaps with adjacent, maybe other design systems,
Moritz Stefaner: like the branding or the UI design, and we need to see how we fit in with all of that.
Moritz Stefaner: I guess what's unique to data visualization is often the extra design vocabulary you need,
Moritz Stefaner: like specific color scales that work, have certain functional properties or
Moritz Stefaner: or chart types and all the things we're all familiar with, legends and axes and whatnot.
Alan Wilson: Yeah, one of the challenges with writing guidelines for data is that differs
Alan Wilson: from brand guidelines and others is some of the other areas are just self-evident
Alan Wilson: and really easy to explain the guidelines for.
Alan Wilson: And data visualization has its own language and its own set of things.
Alan Wilson: I mean, it intersects with data literacy and some specific domain expertise
Alan Wilson: that you might need to be effective.
Alan Wilson: And often I find myself in writing the guidelines, I'm like,
Alan Wilson: man, I need them also to read these books.
Alan Wilson: Or I find myself wanting to teach data visualization as a discipline,
Alan Wilson: and then I can give them guidelines on how to best use visualization.
Alan Wilson: And if you don't have that foundation, sometimes the guidelines come off a bit
Alan Wilson: short because they have to be so basic.
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, same problem here.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, and maybe that's the first real learning I think we all share probably
Moritz Stefaner: is like, you really need to define really well what the purpose of the whole
Moritz Stefaner: thing is and what your audience is.
Moritz Stefaner: Like, is it skilled information designers that use it or should it be implemented
Moritz Stefaner: in an automated system or should it be for total novices,
Moritz Stefaner: like a foolproof system, because that will shape everything in terms of what
Moritz Stefaner: do we even supply people with and in which form, right?
Moritz Stefaner: And yeah, I think if you skip that step, it's going to fall on your feet really soon.
Moritz Stefaner: That's my experience at least.
Moritz Stefaner: But maybe to make this a bit more concrete, maybe we can talk about some of
Moritz Stefaner: the projects you've been working on in that space.
Moritz Stefaner: That gives people a bit of an idea of, okay, what are the different challenges
Moritz Stefaner: and the different types of flavors that exist? So, Alan, do you want to talk
Moritz Stefaner: a bit about Adobe Spectrum?
Alan Wilson: Sure, sure. So Adobe Spectrum is our design system.
Alan Wilson: If you want to take a look at it, you can find it at spectrum.adobe.com. And,
Alan Wilson: Yeah, the first thing I want to point out is that it's a whole team.
Alan Wilson: There's a lot of people involved.
Alan Wilson: And so I am a small piece of that whole ecosystem that builds and maintains that.
Alan Wilson: And the design system was about two years old before we introduced the data viz guidelines.
Alan Wilson: We really struggled to articulate and structure the guidelines in a way that
Alan Wilson: would make sense and be relevant to our users.
Alan Wilson: And we still have a long way to go. I feel like the guidelines right now are
Alan Wilson: pretty basic, but yeah, we have that. And the primary purpose of our guideline
Alan Wilson: is to help people who are building software.
Moritz Stefaner: Right.
Alan Wilson: So it is used for our, you know, dot com website and some other things,
Alan Wilson: but the primary focus is for how do we build, you know, really good software using that system.
Moritz Stefaner: Cool. Gabrielle, how about you?
Gabrielle Mérite: So I worked on quite a couple and I can't talk about everything.
Gabrielle Mérite: So I'll talk about the one I'm publicly allowed to.
Gabrielle Mérite: I think the one that's the most public that you can see on the pentagram website
Gabrielle Mérite: is the Deloitte insight.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's a guideline and templates, so it's not full design systems.
Gabrielle Mérite: And so, DeLaw Insight is a magazine.
Gabrielle Mérite: It also has a web platform attached to it.
Gabrielle Mérite: And previously, before I even joined Pentagram, the team with George Ilobby
Gabrielle Mérite: had actually built guidelines for them before editorial database.
Gabrielle Mérite: So, we're more creative application. So, that was used only by information designer
Gabrielle Mérite: that already knew the roles and were pretty comfortable with it.
Gabrielle Mérite: Talking about audience here. And the issue that came back when they came back
Gabrielle Mérite: was that we cannot give those guidelines pretty much to our normal designers.
Gabrielle Mérite: So the team actually use external, a lot of external designers that are around
Gabrielle Mérite: the world with different backgrounds from different countries.
Gabrielle Mérite: And they produce like hundreds of data viz per month.
Gabrielle Mérite: And they're quite fast, so fast turnaround, you know, little supervision.
Gabrielle Mérite: So we were in contact with more of the creative direction marketing data this
Gabrielle Mérite: team within the organization, not so much the designers.
Gabrielle Mérite: So we had to create templates and guidelines knowing that we have no contact
Gabrielle Mérite: with the final designer that's going to use them.
Gabrielle Mérite: And they are not specialized in information design, not always at least.
Gabrielle Mérite: And they have a high turnaround themselves because they're external contractors.
Moritz Stefaner: So it had to be pretty... It's really
Moritz Stefaner: hard mode. It's like all the hard parameters are switched on, right?
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, it had to be pretty strict. And also, we were working for both web and print.
Moritz Stefaner: Of course.
Gabrielle Mérite: Why not? So just to add a little bit to that.
Moritz Stefaner: So yeah, and a bit of spice, you know.
Gabrielle Mérite: And the law inside covers any themes, so it can be any type of data,
Gabrielle Mérite: whether it's about people, but you know, economic, like anything,
Gabrielle Mérite: everything, throw it in together in one package.
Gabrielle Mérite: So that was probably one that I can talk quite a bit on. And the other one is
Gabrielle Mérite: for a nonprofit organization that I cannot name.
Gabrielle Mérite: They work in the gender equality space. And this one was tricky because we had
Gabrielle Mérite: to do it and they hadn't produced any work yet.
Gabrielle Mérite: It was made simultaneously to a brand. And so they knew what type of data they were working with.
Gabrielle Mérite: But they had not produced anything. So we didn't have anything to even review.
Gabrielle Mérite: We had to do from start and we had to make sure it would be used by designers
Gabrielle Mérite: and non-designers for social media, PowerPoints, anything possible.
Gabrielle Mérite: So that was another challenge on really sensitive topics too.
Gabrielle Mérite: So definitely interesting different challenges here.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, so you can see already it's quite different requirements and you need
Moritz Stefaner: to be smart about what you do, right? And how that will play out.
Moritz Stefaner: So maybe talking about process, then how do you...
Moritz Stefaner: Address this? Like, do you first build a lot of chart examples,
Moritz Stefaner: like in your design team, and then say like, okay, what are the recurring patterns?
Moritz Stefaner: What seems to work? What doesn't seem to work? Or do you do it more top down in terms of,
Moritz Stefaner: okay, we have the following principles, we have the following project constraints,
Moritz Stefaner: you know, and sort of do it very like deductive in the sense that,
Moritz Stefaner: okay, only one solution, you know, seems to work anymore, now that we have like defined everything?
Moritz Stefaner: Or is it a mixture? Like, how did you address these? How did you approach this
Moritz Stefaner: project? Maybe Gabby, you can.
Gabrielle Mérite: Okay, I'll start. It might be very different because we so we even me as an
Gabrielle Mérite: independent or within Pentagram, we are external contractors.
Gabrielle Mérite: So we don't have access to everything internally in the organization that might
Gabrielle Mérite: be quite different than the way Alan works typically.
Gabrielle Mérite: So the way I like to work is I start with what I call analysis phase,
Gabrielle Mérite: which is just looking at obviously who the organization is.
Gabrielle Mérite: The more classic design brief analysis of who the client is,
Gabrielle Mérite: what do they know, what do they don't know.
Gabrielle Mérite: So if they have data visits, it's great because it gives you a great insight
Gabrielle Mérite: on what has been produced, what type of data do they work with,
Gabrielle Mérite: what are the mistakes they keep making, what are the problems they keep.
Gabrielle Mérite: You can even have a whole almost user research phase.
Moritz Stefaner: So the idea is to... First the diagnosis, then the prescription, right?
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, a little bit. But just identifying existing useful patterns,
Gabrielle Mérite: things that have worked too and things that are not working in the current applications,
Gabrielle Mérite: and who is working with it.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's way harder when we have a project, like I was talking earlier,
Gabrielle Mérite: where we don't have access to those existing applications, because there's none.
Gabrielle Mérite: But there's always a base somewhere of what data are they going to use?
Gabrielle Mérite: Where is it going to be published?
Gabrielle Mérite: So I like the science in space and understanding, again, who is going to use the guidelines and,
Gabrielle Mérite: This is the audience of the guidelines. So is it designer or non-designer?
Gabrielle Mérite: Because it's not always for designer.
Gabrielle Mérite: But also who's the final audience of the data visualization?
Gabrielle Mérite: So there's a second layer.
Moritz Stefaner: It's a double hop.
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, there's a double hop here of like, OK, typically, if you work for a nonprofit,
Gabrielle Mérite: the final product is going to be a public, a very uninformed public,
Gabrielle Mérite: or on a sensitive topic. So what are the constraints already that I impose on
Gabrielle Mérite: the project? So there's all this analysis phase.
Gabrielle Mérite: And then I guess it's a bit of a mix match. What I like to do is a bit more of like,
Gabrielle Mérite: if it doesn't exist anymore, it's kind of like doing design first and then link
Gabrielle Mérite: that back to the foundation of, I find it difficult to build the foundation
Gabrielle Mérite: first, decide the colors, everything
Gabrielle Mérite: without testing them, because you're gonna end up changing them.
Gabrielle Mérite: So I tend to, even if the project doesn't include making templates,
Gabrielle Mérite: kind of templatize a little bit, like test out some basic charts or things they
Gabrielle Mérite: use regularly to see if we can start finding patterns and put that back into guidelines.
Gabrielle Mérite: So that's kind of how it works. The only added thing that I do and then Pentagram
Gabrielle Mérite: does too is what we call creative direction, which is maybe a little different
Gabrielle Mérite: than a traditional style gal,
Gabrielle Mérite: which we're trying to find what makes those these evolutions stand out.
Gabrielle Mérite: How do we connect them to the voice of the brand?
Gabrielle Mérite: And so it's not just through just colors and typefaces, but is there something
Gabrielle Mérite: specific, a specific way of a specific shape you use systematically.
Gabrielle Mérite: So not just basic charts.
Moritz Stefaner: Like an actual design idea in a sense that there is, there's like a design approach to it.
Gabrielle Mérite: Is there a metaphor that we can use throughout? Is there something that makes
Gabrielle Mérite: it stand out that's just not a design decision, but that makes it unique?
Gabrielle Mérite: And so that is a little more, on the creative side, that's less common.
Gabrielle Mérite: And then it's even harder to explain in Style Guides. But it's part of that
Gabrielle Mérite: thinking. And then usually you test that on basic chart and then you test that
Gabrielle Mérite: on editorialized charts because all client usually needs editorial charts and not the most basic.
Gabrielle Mérite: You know, the most traditional charts, just to check if it works in conjunction
Gabrielle Mérite: with other organizational systems, like does it work in a magazine spread,
Gabrielle Mérite: does it work in social media format?
Gabrielle Mérite: And then we systemize that and we put that all together in like extended guidelines.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, but there's an interesting tension because of course you and Georgia of
Moritz Stefaner: course are typically known and booked for a super creative, unique,
Moritz Stefaner: one of a kind work, right?
Moritz Stefaner: And now the expectation is you do that, but also make it repeatable. Right?
Gabrielle Mérite: And so I think there's an interesting tension there.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's definitely a challenge. It's actually quite interesting because we end up creating,
Gabrielle Mérite: to me, it's almost like I split the guidelines into traditional charts with
Gabrielle Mérite: the most traditional bar charts, bar charts, whatever you need to have that
Gabrielle Mérite: needs to be made in PowerPoint, like we've got custom design,
Gabrielle Mérite: especially if we have users that are not designers.
Gabrielle Mérite: So PowerPoint, Canvas, RowGraph, the easy building building blocks that can
Gabrielle Mérite: be reproduced and used for anything we port. But then we usually have a second
Gabrielle Mérite: section that's for designers, an information designer.
Gabrielle Mérite: And sometimes it can overlap a little bit. It can be very simple things that
Gabrielle Mérite: you can do. Adding a shadow, adding a texture, photography.
Gabrielle Mérite: How do you use photography? Do you crop it? Do you not crop it? Is it textured?
Gabrielle Mérite: Is it black and white? Does it use a color? So this is something that we add
Gabrielle Mérite: that's almost branding and that adds customization into the guidelines.
Moritz Stefaner: Cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, it's super interesting.
Moritz Stefaner: Ellen, I could imagine your process is totally different because you don't work
Moritz Stefaner: in an agency, but it's more this ongoing big ship instead of the little dinghy
Moritz Stefaner: with the little party on it.
Alan Wilson: Yeah, yeah. Earlier in my career, I worked for agency.
Alan Wilson: And we did a lot of brand guides and things of that nature, which certainly
Alan Wilson: informed a lot of the work that I do now, but yeah, it is different.
Alan Wilson: And I do think there's no one process for this stuff. It really is,
Alan Wilson: part of the problem here is figuring out what an organization needs and how
Alan Wilson: you can best deliver that.
Alan Wilson: But for us, and one of the advantages of being an internal team is we can deliver
Alan Wilson: things incrementally, right? It's not a single deliverable.
Alan Wilson: We can do something and then add to that over time.
Alan Wilson: And so that's the approach that we've taken is, and we try and prioritize the
Alan Wilson: most important, most valuable, the things that are gonna have the biggest impact
Alan Wilson: and then keep adding to that.
Alan Wilson: And at some point we'll reach a threshold where, the incremental value isn't
Alan Wilson: worth the incremental cost.
Alan Wilson: Be that, actually monetary costs are just costing complexity because as your
Alan Wilson: system grows, You can't grow indefinitely or it becomes unusable because it's
Alan Wilson: too big and too complicated.
Alan Wilson: Starting to run up against the bounds of what we feel is an appropriate level of complexity.
Alan Wilson: But yeah, we do start with the end in mind.
Alan Wilson: So we'll often produce a lot of example screens and visualizations and UIs and
Alan Wilson: then write the guidelines that would produce those, if that makes sense. So we work backwards.
Moritz Stefaner: Retrofit, basically. What would have been the rules that would have made these
Moritz Stefaner: choice that obviously seem to work.
Alan Wilson: Exactly. I feel like that's a good approach.
Alan Wilson: But at some point you have enough guidelines that you don't have to start with
Alan Wilson: the end and you can just take what's existing and expand it a little and then
Alan Wilson: see what comes out of it. Yeah.
Moritz Stefaner: That's something we also struggled with a lot is you want to get started somewhere
Moritz Stefaner: and build stuff and see stuff. Otherwise, how could you even progress in the
Moritz Stefaner: project? project, right? You need something visual to work with and to debate.
Moritz Stefaner: At the same time, you feel like it's such a big system. And if we just keep
Moritz Stefaner: making graphics, you know, it's never be a proper system system, right?
Moritz Stefaner: And so when when do you introduce these rules? Or do you redo all the example
Moritz Stefaner: charts you did before if some design decision changes?
Moritz Stefaner: Like, you know, how do you keep it dynamic also? And one thing I found there
Moritz Stefaner: is this design tokens approach that I'm super excited about.
Moritz Stefaner: It's like, so if you're a bit technical inclined or you like coding anyways,
Moritz Stefaner: then I think that's worth looking into because it's a really neat way to sort
Moritz Stefaner: of store all the basic design decisions in the standardized format.
Moritz Stefaner: And then ideally if the brand color changes or if the background color changes,
Moritz Stefaner: it all trickles through your implementations.
Moritz Stefaner: There's also the risk that you could then keep perfecting that system.
Moritz Stefaner: And it becomes a little hobby to clean the token structure and rethink about the hierarchies then.
Moritz Stefaner: But I think that helped me a lot to think about, okay, what are the building blocks?
Moritz Stefaner: We need a background color. We also need a sort of a shaded background color.
Moritz Stefaner: We need two text colors or maybe three, right?
Moritz Stefaner: Them by how they look, but what
Moritz Stefaner: they do. Oh, it's the high contrast or the low contrast version of it.
Moritz Stefaner: And that helped me a lot to think about it in a structured way on the basic
Moritz Stefaner: LEGO building block level and stay flexible in terms of, oh,
Moritz Stefaner: I think we should change the text color on all charts.
Moritz Stefaner: That was much easier because we had that system in place. So yeah.
Gabrielle Mérite: That's the benefits of design systems. Because I think instead of the GAN line
Gabrielle Mérite: constrained versus as a design system and tokens and components and patterns
Gabrielle Mérite: help you be more flexible.
Gabrielle Mérite: In my opinion, it's like, it's more, we're giving you the blocks and then you can make it yourself.
Gabrielle Mérite: And here are just a couple of rules about big mistakes you could make.
Gabrielle Mérite: And you know, at Pentagram we do a lot of just the rules only.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I think that can be constraining and not flexible for an organization.
Alan Wilson: Yeah, on the flip side, I think it allows that creative work to have greater impact.
Alan Wilson: So if you have to design every chart by hand, you spend a lot of time designing
Alan Wilson: the same thing again and again and again and again.
Alan Wilson: But if you have a system and you're designing the system and playing with the
Alan Wilson: tokens, the output scales up really quickly. I mean, it's nearly infinite,
Alan Wilson: You have so many different outputs that can be automated.
Alan Wilson: And so, yeah, it's that flip.
Alan Wilson: The other side of it, right, is that the creativity that is left to do is more
Alan Wilson: impactful and less menial.
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, I love that. Because I think sometimes what you hear is,
Gabrielle Mérite: well, we don't need one because we want to do creative things, but it's the opposite.
Gabrielle Mérite: If you remove the small choices of picking the right font sizes,
Gabrielle Mérite: font sizes, picking the right font away, then you can spend more time actually
Gabrielle Mérite: looking for creative solution, but you have some blocks that are predefined
Gabrielle Mérite: that makes it way faster. And repeatable, obviously.
Gabrielle Mérite: So I tend to agree, I think it actually opens up more flexibility, if anything.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah. But it's an ongoing thing. And I think another big challenge is,
Moritz Stefaner: I think the initial version is easy to build, right?
Moritz Stefaner: Like how do you make it grow? How does it evolve over time?
Moritz Stefaner: And how do you not have it end up like the German administration that has lots
Moritz Stefaner: of really good rules that in isolation make a lot of sense, but it's a bit too many of them overall.
Moritz Stefaner: And so how do you manage?
Moritz Stefaner: Complexity when things grow, right? Or even out of your hands at some point.
Moritz Stefaner: Like, what's the life cycle of the whole thing?
Alan Wilson: Well, my experience is the opposite. I think the first step is the hardest. Interesting.
Alan Wilson: The initial thing is so hard. Maybe it's just my nature that I want it to be
Alan Wilson: whole or complete in some way.
Alan Wilson: And just right from the beginning. Exactly. I have that kind of perfectionist
Alan Wilson: mentality. I don't want to put something out out there until it's ready and
Alan Wilson: I really am confident in it.
Alan Wilson: But my, and so my experience is that part is the difficult part,
Alan Wilson: but once you do have something out there, then delivering incremental value
Alan Wilson: is a lot easier because you have a good feedback loop, right?
Alan Wilson: You know what people are using, you know what they like, you're hearing feedback.
Alan Wilson: I mean, designers have feedback, right? They'll tell you what is and isn't working
Alan Wilson: for them and you can spend time with them to get into the why.
Alan Wilson: And then for me, the rest of the process is more natural. It's a lot more service
Alan Wilson: oriented where you're like, oh, okay, well, this isn't working,
Alan Wilson: so let's focus on fixing it, or this doesn't exist yet, so let's create that thing.
Alan Wilson: And it's really just how many people need that. And that can be a little more
Alan Wilson: harder to determine, but you're just trying to measure impact.
Moritz Stefaner: Well, like, Gabby and I, we are brought in as external consultants, your in-house.
Moritz Stefaner: What do you think? What can the roles of external consultants be versus in-house folks?
Moritz Stefaner: I've also met people who said, design system? No, we don't work with external
Moritz Stefaner: people on our design system.
Moritz Stefaner: That doesn't make sense, right? Because they've begun in three months,
Moritz Stefaner: then it takes care of the actual work that happens afterwards.
Moritz Stefaner: Or is there something we can do? I don't know. What's going to take on that?
Alan Wilson: Well, at Adobe, we treat Spectrum like a product, like any other product at Adobe.
Alan Wilson: It's a thing that we build. The differences, our user base is almost entirely
Alan Wilson: internal. We do have some external people, vendors and partners and so on,
Alan Wilson: and so on that use Vectrum.
Alan Wilson: The primary audience is internal. And so I don't know how you would have a similar model with an agency.
Alan Wilson: Not to say that agencies don't play a role in creating some of the initial work
Alan Wilson: or coming in and helping you audit it or bring new life to it, bring new ideas.
Alan Wilson: Sometimes things can get a little stale internally because you're just kind
Alan Wilson: of recycling the same set of ideas among the same set of people,
Alan Wilson: so fresh perspective can be really useful.
Alan Wilson: I also think it depends on the nature of your organization, how big it is,
Alan Wilson: right? If you are a relatively small startup, you can't spare even a single
Alan Wilson: person to run a design system. That would be ludicrous to consider.
Alan Wilson: And so having someone build something for you that you can just use and maybe
Alan Wilson: touch up every year or so might be a better route to go.
Alan Wilson: There's as many solutions as there are problems.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, that's true. Gabby, any thoughts on that?
Gabrielle Mérite: No, you raise a good point. Because I found it frustrating as a designer who
Gabrielle Mérite: makes guidelines as a contractor, to just, we dropped it to a client and we're out of here.
Gabrielle Mérite: Like, no feedback matters. There's a scope that's defined, there's a budget
Gabrielle Mérite: that's defined. So if the scope was that we don't get feedback on it,
Gabrielle Mérite: we don't get feedback on it. Even though it works or it doesn't work,
Gabrielle Mérite: it doesn't matter almost because we get paid.
Gabrielle Mérite: Unfortunately, that's how the business works.
Gabrielle Mérite: I hear you, Alan, and I agree. I think there's a space for it where a small
Gabrielle Mérite: organization cannot afford, they don't have the time and the resources to set
Gabrielle Mérite: it up, like the initial big phase of doing that work.
Gabrielle Mérite: But I do think that the development and the incremental changes needs to be
Gabrielle Mérite: done internally, otherwise you're going to end up paying an external agency
Gabrielle Mérite: for everything and they are not as familiar to your organization needs.
Gabrielle Mérite: Than the organization itself.
Gabrielle Mérite: As an extraordinary don't say that we have a value that we bring.
Gabrielle Mérite: Maybe it's at the initial phase, maybe it's at a big review phase,
Gabrielle Mérite: maybe it's just to, you know, nobody has time. So, you know,
Gabrielle Mérite: you give them, you let them do kind of the work and then you take over.
Gabrielle Mérite: But yeah, we cannot if you're going to maintain it, it has to be done internally.
Gabrielle Mérite: I think, you know, oh, sometimes we can come at consulting to solve issues.
Gabrielle Mérite: But I really think that, you know, our values are definitely limited here. We can't do it all.
Alan Wilson: Well, and I think that's part of the value of a design system,
Alan Wilson: is it needs to be a living thing.
Alan Wilson: Because if it's static, it just doesn't continue to solve problems.
Alan Wilson: You need it to evolve to solve the different problems that you encounter.
Moritz Stefaner: So, yeah. Yeah, and I've been thinking a lot about that too.
Moritz Stefaner: How do we actually make sure people use the things that we design and keep using?
Moritz Stefaner: And they say like software is either maintained or abandoned.
Moritz Stefaner: And I feel like the same might happen with design systems.
Moritz Stefaner: If you don't like have somebody internally always pushing for this,
Moritz Stefaner: the system we use, it's cool. This is how you use it. Right.
Moritz Stefaner: And so you need also these these advocates and people who do onboarding with
Moritz Stefaner: new folks to keep it going and so on.
Moritz Stefaner: And yeah, and somehow you need to think about that whole social process around it as well.
Moritz Stefaner: Right. Yeah, the other thing I was thinking about, maybe it's good also not
Moritz Stefaner: to have so much rules, but more, maybe supply more templates or tools or like
Moritz Stefaner: really easy one-click solutions, you know, to do something.
Moritz Stefaner: So think about what's the threshold to even using your design system.
Moritz Stefaner: Like if it seems to be a big burden or like a big like, oh, I need to read this
Moritz Stefaner: whole book before I can make a single tried, you know, then that immediately might be off putting.
Moritz Stefaner: And if you're then not there to enforce it, it's like, yeah,
Moritz Stefaner: we don't care so much about this big rule book.
Moritz Stefaner: So yeah, but then again, you need to know really well what people want to make
Moritz Stefaner: with it. And maybe that's often not that clear.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's interesting to think that...
Gabrielle Mérite: External contractors like me, for instance, are designer and use guidelines.
Gabrielle Mérite: So we are often like the consumer of the product itself.
Gabrielle Mérite: And so I guess the way I see it, I've changed quite a bit of the way Starguide
Gabrielle Mérite: in agency work is often, Starguide only is a big PDF of 60 pages.
Gabrielle Mérite: You know, PDF, all school, sometimes made for print. So vertical, right?
Moritz Stefaner: Also books, real books.
Gabrielle Mérite: So it's interesting how you can just come in and be like, I know what I would
Gabrielle Mérite: like. So to your point, I think sometimes we don't have access,
Gabrielle Mérite: at least I didn't have access to the designer that would be using the book,
Gabrielle Mérite: but I was like, here's what I wish I had.
Gabrielle Mérite: So, you know, text style, paragraph style made in advance in Illustrator.
Gabrielle Mérite: Paragraph style made in advance in Figma.
Moritz Stefaner: Template documents, right?
Gabrielle Mérite: Just that kind of thing. I don't want to have the copy paste,
Gabrielle Mérite: the goddamn hex code anymore.
Gabrielle Mérite: Just things like that. So I think it's interesting how, you know,
Gabrielle Mérite: But sometimes we forget also, we do things a certain way.
Gabrielle Mérite: So it's interesting how sometimes having somebody new coming in can help with
Gabrielle Mérite: that or can look at it being like, I'm not sure this is working for me.
Gabrielle Mérite: Because I also find places where they're like, well, we do use the brand guidelines.
Gabrielle Mérite: We don't really know what we need.
Gabrielle Mérite: So there's a balance in everything of asking the audience, having your own input
Gabrielle Mérite: and being flexible enough to change how we do things every time.
Gabrielle Mérite: For a new client, for instance, I change it every time.
Gabrielle Mérite: Everything, including the basic charts or the decision charts,
Gabrielle Mérite: and decided what chart to use when, It's different for every client, depending on the topic.
Gabrielle Mérite: So it's definitely interesting how the audience can, can like force us to adapt
Gabrielle Mérite: every time, even for just the initial brief. And then I can imagine internally how that changes.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah.
Alan Wilson: I mean, I have a very similar experience. The very first foray I had into this
Alan Wilson: was like a 60 page PDF, exactly as you described.
Alan Wilson: And we printed it out and it actually, everyone loved it. Cause they had,
Alan Wilson: we didn't have anything like that before.
Alan Wilson: And so people like engineers and designers had it at their desk and they'd have
Alan Wilson: it flipped open to pages, but they would be typing in those X codes and rebuilding
Alan Wilson: the buttons themselves.
Alan Wilson: And so it was only a week or two before an engineer was like,
Alan Wilson: can we just get this in Git so that I don't have to rebuild all this stuff?
Alan Wilson: And we had designers that are like, where's the, this is how old I am as a designer,
Alan Wilson: where's the Illustrator template for this or the Photoshop template for this?
Moritz Stefaner: Or the palettes you can download and all that stuff.
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, I just want an AAC file with my call of help.
Alan Wilson: Thank you. Exactly. And so we started to create those. And so it slowly evolved
Alan Wilson: from a PDF that people printed and kept on their desk to a website with downloadable resources.
Alan Wilson: And I think it's really important to meet people where they are.
Alan Wilson: There are times when you need to push people into new and different tools to
Alan Wilson: better do their job. But for the most part, they have the tools to do their
Alan Wilson: job and they just need you to provide the resources.
Alan Wilson: And so if your users are in PowerPoint.
Moritz Stefaner: Make it easier.
Alan Wilson: Exactly, if they're in PowerPoint and that's what they're using to build their
Alan Wilson: charts or Excel, you've got to provide those Excel and PowerPoint templates.
Alan Wilson: It pains me sometimes to say that, but it's true. And likewise,
Alan Wilson: if they're in R or Tableau, use the tools that they use, provide the resources
Alan Wilson: in that tool's format that form tools language and you'll be more successful by far.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, I think that's interesting. And I think that also, if you take that super serious means,
Moritz Stefaner: really, you can't be too picky about all this, the design details,
Moritz Stefaner: really, like, what the spacing is exactly, or, you know, what type of tricky
Moritz Stefaner: access configuration you have come up with, but really be more really clear
Moritz Stefaner: about these are our underlying principles.
Moritz Stefaner: And this is what, like, qualities all all of our charts should have in terms
Moritz Stefaner: of accessibility or voice or whatever, but then being really flexible about how that happens.
Moritz Stefaner: And maybe there as a designer, we need to be a bit more like,
Moritz Stefaner: the details don't matter that much, it's fine as long as the general direction is good.
Alan Wilson: Or am I being too generous here? No, there's a lot of truth to that.
Alan Wilson: But I feel like one of my roles as a designer is to never give up on the ideal, right?
Alan Wilson: So I always- It's facing matters. It does. That rounded corner makes a difference,
Alan Wilson: right? It's only a one pixel axi, but just round that corner and it just makes it sing, right?
Alan Wilson: And you can get that if they're working in one tool, but in another tool,
Alan Wilson: like it just doesn't support that.
Alan Wilson: So there's a reality to what you're saying, but I do think we need to advocate
Alan Wilson: for the ideal and then compromise as needed.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, yeah. You can have one gold standard implementation also,
Moritz Stefaner: where you say this is how it really should look like.
Moritz Stefaner: That's how it's meant, but then maybe flexible on.
Moritz Stefaner: In a different context, it's fine if it doesn't hit all the design details.
Gabrielle Mérite: I also found it, it's often that, to me, the pixel close, those precise details
Gabrielle Mérite: helpful sometimes for specifically non-designers or people who are like not,
Gabrielle Mérite: I think this, because we can't teach them design, we have to give them really
Gabrielle Mérite: precise rules so that they don't have the understanding of what the right spacing in, text hierarchy.
Gabrielle Mérite: And so we see it regularly when researchers make PowerPoint,
Gabrielle Mérite: right? No offense to researchers out here.
Gabrielle Mérite: We respect you, we used to be there, we know how it feels. But I think sometimes
Gabrielle Mérite: they just don't have the sense, they don't have time to even learn,
Gabrielle Mérite: and we don't wanna make them designers.
Gabrielle Mérite: So it's more, those rules can also be set up sometimes just to actually help
Gabrielle Mérite: them without having to like give them free workshop on how to do database.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's just like, here is it easy. You just have to follow this exact guidelines,
Gabrielle Mérite: this exact pixel, this exact roundling corner in your software,
Gabrielle Mérite: we give it to you so that you don't have to think about it really and to make your job faster.
Gabrielle Mérite: Otherwise, interpretation is nice, especially as designers, we know how to do
Gabrielle Mérite: things. So we feel more comfortable taking some freedom into interpretation of the guidelines.
Gabrielle Mérite: But I think for other users, it might be really important to just help with
Gabrielle Mérite: that and just give really precise guidelines that just makes their work easier.
Moritz Stefaner: But then I'm thinking if the exact one-to-one look really matters,
Moritz Stefaner: then maybe it's actually better to supply a software that creates the thing
Moritz Stefaner: as it should look, or a template, because otherwise you end up with really long, super detailed specs.
Gabrielle Mérite: I think so, but it's hard to sell to clients sometimes.
Gabrielle Mérite: At the industry level, I think that's what I run into is often we get scoped
Gabrielle Mérite: for just the guidelines and no templates.
Gabrielle Mérite: And they may come back six months later and ask for the templates.
Gabrielle Mérite: That happens regularly. But you wish you could sell it and be like,
Gabrielle Mérite: you're going to need this. Believe me, you're going to need this.
Moritz Stefaner: And the guidelines. Yeah, this is where this initial scoping comes in,
Moritz Stefaner: in terms of, okay, what do you hope to achieve? Who is this for?
Moritz Stefaner: What are the actual things we should supply because of that, right?
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, interesting. And at the same time, the whole tooling landscape is shifting
Moritz Stefaner: too, right? It's like, what do you do your charts in?
Moritz Stefaner: There's a new answer to that every two years. And ideally, our stuff should
Moritz Stefaner: survive a few of these iterations as well in terms of tooling.
Moritz Stefaner: And so there are a lot of challenges there.
Moritz Stefaner: I think we need to sort of wrap things up semi-soon.
Moritz Stefaner: I have two more questions. So one is about are there any caveats,
Moritz Stefaner: traps, failures, things you wish you would have known before somebody sent you
Moritz Stefaner: on that impossible journey that you could share with our audience who might be new to the field,
Moritz Stefaner: like something valuable to avoid or just stuff that happened.
Alan Wilson: Oh boy, I would say be humble and listen.
Alan Wilson: I remember early on I had just discovered histograms and I'm like,
Alan Wilson: oh histograms, okay. And I thought I understood what a histogram was.
Alan Wilson: And I was writing guidelines and explaining to people and six months later I
Alan Wilson: realized I was wrong about some fundamental things.
Alan Wilson: And it was difficult to eat that crow and fix the wrongs that I had done.
Alan Wilson: Because people trusted me, right? I taught them things and I thought I was right
Alan Wilson: and they thought I was right. And I wish I had just been taking a little more
Alan Wilson: time to educate myself before I had put forth these things.
Moritz Stefaner: So early feedback and really get people to comment on everything.
Alan Wilson: Yeah, yeah.
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, I like that you said people trust me, because to my point,
Gabrielle Mérite: I think, especially at Contractor, we get a lot of trust, and they hire us as experts, right?
Gabrielle Mérite: So we tend to be trusted, and you know, whatever we say, it's going to be the
Gabrielle Mérite: Bible. And I found it problematic.
Gabrielle Mérite: Not problematic, but I found that it's a lot of responsibility that we forget, I think.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I wrote about this recently, but I think especially when we make guidelines
Gabrielle Mérite: that are going to be used potentially by hundreds of people or templates,
Gabrielle Mérite: it's, we have such a responsibility to do them properly.
Gabrielle Mérite: So not just for the users so that they're usable, easy to understand,
Gabrielle Mérite: et cetera, et cetera. But I think we need to meet the big caveat when I got
Gabrielle Mérite: lines is we don't approach like ethics in database and guidelines.
Gabrielle Mérite: We're like, here's the job. This is how you make it.
Gabrielle Mérite: Especially when you like me and you work with a lot of data that like social data. So bad people.
Gabrielle Mérite: Of course, I think it's getting more common, accessibility, some kind of rules.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's becoming more common, but I still see a lot of it as just like,
Gabrielle Mérite: here's the colors, here's the thing, do whatever you want.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I just, I want to start this conversation with,
Gabrielle Mérite: you know, maybe we shouldn't, the colors matter, but maybe we should also question
Gabrielle Mérite: like, should guidelines also offer more guidance on when do you actually need to do database?
Gabrielle Mérite: Which database should you be doing? Like should you actually emphasize differences
Gabrielle Mérite: between social groups, ethnicity for instance?
Gabrielle Mérite: Like we have research nowadays that shows that maybe it's a problem to raise awareness this way.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I'm wondering, and I know it's a little further than what designers are,
Gabrielle Mérite: I think we get caught into the detail of design, but at least designers like
Gabrielle Mérite: me who work on guidelines for those big organizations that,
Gabrielle Mérite: you know, approaches like sensitive topics, I'm just wondering if there's a
Gabrielle Mérite: place for us to be more responsible and think twice about the work we do and
Gabrielle Mérite: give guidance on maybe even terminology.
Gabrielle Mérite: Like, how do we use, you know, ethnicities? Yeah, texts. Like,
Gabrielle Mérite: you know, how are we, can we promote transparency in how data is sourced within
Gabrielle Mérite: the guidelines? Like, I think there's so much more we can do with it that's
Gabrielle Mérite: not just design related.
Gabrielle Mérite: So I guess that's my big statement. I just want designers to be a little more,
Gabrielle Mérite: but to also space is happening.
Moritz Stefaner: Think about more than decoration of numbers, right?
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah. And also have that humility, you know. I think he makes a great point.
Gabrielle Mérite: We are a little bit approaching a top-down approach, like designers say something,
Gabrielle Mérite: and we are problem solvers.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, and also the hope is with this design system, it's the Bible.
Moritz Stefaner: It's once and for all, this is how you do it. And we all know this is not how it works.
Moritz Stefaner: You can be brilliant at your job and do it for 30 years, and still every project
Moritz Stefaner: is new, and there's always uncertainties and doubt.
Moritz Stefaner: And you could always do it this way or that way, and in the end you just make
Moritz Stefaner: an informed judgment call. but there's no absolute truth in design, right? And so, yeah.
Alan Wilson: I love that point because I think there's so many decisions that lead up to
Alan Wilson: the final product of a visualization.
Alan Wilson: And a visualization doesn't often acknowledge those things, right?
Alan Wilson: I think that's one of the most problematic pieces of data visualization is because
Alan Wilson: it's so easy to trust. That's why we see so many problems emerge around dishonest
Alan Wilson: charts and things of that nature.
Alan Wilson: Even the most well-intentioned individual is obscuring the actual truth to some
Alan Wilson: extent in an effort to tell a story or to simplify a problem or illustrate a point.
Alan Wilson: So I don't know how to solve that, but, and it goes back to,
Alan Wilson: I guess, one of my earlier points about the desire to educate people,
Alan Wilson: not just about styles, but about
Alan Wilson: data literacy and all the overlaps and intricacies of data visualization.
Alan Wilson: I just, I think that's an important thing. And to your point,
Alan Wilson: Gabriel, we can't lose sight of that.
Gabrielle Mérite: Yeah, I don't know how to do that in guidelines. It's definitely an education maybe,
Gabrielle Mérite: but it is about, I think we tend to focus designer,
Gabrielle Mérite: we're taught for a long time that we are like solution maker,
Gabrielle Mérite: you know, but we should focus on approaches, on like something that's flexible,
Gabrielle Mérite: agile, and that gives space to others to give the opinion and take decision,
Gabrielle Mérite: you know, give them the best tool, including an educative tool,
Gabrielle Mérite: to make those decisions rather than just get really strict guidance that might
Gabrielle Mérite: be also found false or harmful in 20 years, because I think we see a lot of that nowadays.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah, that's a great point. Maybe it's related to my last provocation that I
Moritz Stefaner: want to throw in here, because maybe I'm just getting old, but I find that a
Moritz Stefaner: lot of design is really boring these days. Like web design is super boring.
Moritz Stefaner: Everything looks the same. There's like big round buttons.
Moritz Stefaner: You know, I feel like there's like five templates and they are just applied all over the whole web.
Moritz Stefaner: And I think in a way it's cool because everything's super easy to use now.
Moritz Stefaner: No surprises. It's like, cool, I know my way around.
Moritz Stefaner: On the other hand, I feel like if we streamline everything and everything gets
Moritz Stefaner: formalized and optimized and templatized and standardized, where's the fun in that?
Moritz Stefaner: No, don't we abstract away all the interesting, a bit uncomfortable,
Moritz Stefaner: weird, edgy things? If everything becomes formalized and standardized?
Moritz Stefaner: And are we contributing to that with our design system work?
Moritz Stefaner: That's something I've been thinking about.
Gabrielle Mérite: I have a thought on that. So it's an interesting question because you said,
Gabrielle Mérite: I know my way around, which I think most people do, and the idea of we've standardized
Gabrielle Mérite: web design, for instance, is pretty standardized.
Gabrielle Mérite: I think there's a question of like, it's standard that's for who?
Gabrielle Mérite: Because we're in this conversation, right? We're standards, you're centric and then Americans.
Gabrielle Mérite: And I think we need to ask this question of like, when we do that,
Gabrielle Mérite: when we automatize things, when we do this thing of standardizing,
Gabrielle Mérite: do we take into account enough people?
Gabrielle Mérite: I think we all have this thing of like, this is how design is done.
Gabrielle Mérite: Modernism, it needs to be clean and minimal and sensitive.
Moritz Stefaner: Like, why?
Gabrielle Mérite: You know, when you look at design from East Asia, like, it might look very different.
Gabrielle Mérite: And to the eyes of American designers like me, I mean, like,
Gabrielle Mérite: it's messy. It doesn't respect text hierarchy. It's not albedica.
Gabrielle Mérite: Well, no, albedica doesn't write like in the story, guys.
Gabrielle Mérite: So it's interesting how I wonder, I'm not against it. I actually found it like, to me, automating.
Moritz Stefaner: But you question if it's actually true or if it's just a slice of reality or...
Gabrielle Mérite: Is it for the right thing? When is it used? How is it used? For who is it used?
Gabrielle Mérite: Is I think those questions that, you know, are like, I find challenging.
Gabrielle Mérite: Like, I want to automate my workflow. I want to, I think it's so practical to
Gabrielle Mérite: have those technology, Figma components.
Gabrielle Mérite: Like, it's so great. I just wonder if we automate, we tend to repeat a certain
Gabrielle Mérite: point of view in design that has been put by a certain type of population.
Gabrielle Mérite: And maybe it doesn't apply to everyone, it's not fit for every audience.
Alan Wilson: Yeah, I agree with that. I think that I like that.
Alan Wilson: I think my take on it is that sometimes it's an enabler. We've talked about
Alan Wilson: that a little bit already.
Alan Wilson: By systemizing design, it enables you to design a lot of things at once.
Alan Wilson: And that's really cool. And I think that's really powerful.
Alan Wilson: And typically, the thing that kind of design you're enabling is,
Alan Wilson: to your point, more it's pretty expected and not terribly exciting.
Alan Wilson: But it works and it's usable. But that's not to say you couldn't build a system
Alan Wilson: that is just wild and crazy and super creative.
Alan Wilson: So I think I'm really excited for the next 10 years because I think not only
Alan Wilson: are the tools that we to do this work going to continue to evolve and change,
Alan Wilson: and there's going to be new ones and things, I think the work that comes out
Alan Wilson: of those tools is going to be better too.
Alan Wilson: I think one of the challenges to being creative isn't necessarily the systemization,
Alan Wilson: it's the feedback loop, right?
Alan Wilson: Right now, like I author my system over here, and then I see the results over
Alan Wilson: here, and it's very difficult to kind of connect all those dots.
Alan Wilson: And I think software is going to get better and better providing creative feedback
Alan Wilson: loops for all types of design, not just.
Alan Wilson: The kind of traditional print and web design that we've done up until now,
Alan Wilson: but the more system level design.
Moritz Stefaner: If you think about AI tools, they can generate hundreds of variations of something,
Moritz Stefaner: and then you pick and curate and combine.
Moritz Stefaner: That's a whole new thing. Exactly.
Gabrielle Mérite: I think the idea of curating, I'm obsessed with AI, I think it's going to change
Gabrielle Mérite: how we approach things. I think it's a tool.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's just a tool. So we need to use it as a tool and it's not a finality.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's not just you run it and then you just dump it and that's done.
Gabrielle Mérite: And if we involve human beings in it and we still have a customization of it,
Gabrielle Mérite: you know, and we we curate the result, then then that's the it seems like the
Gabrielle Mérite: right approach to do that.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah. Yeah. And maybe Lego is a good metaphor in a sense that it's super standardized.
Moritz Stefaner: Like Lego is the most standardized tool you could think of or toy you can think of, right?
Moritz Stefaner: Actually, each block is super boring, but you can build anything out of it.
Moritz Stefaner: It's like endless fun, right? And so maybe, yeah, thinking about more like,
Moritz Stefaner: oh, it's building blocks.
Moritz Stefaner: It's something you can play with and build stuff out of, you know,
Moritz Stefaner: is a better thought than it's a book of laws. You have to abide to it. Yeah.
Gabrielle Mérite: It might also help with gatekeeping in a way. Like, I wonder how much,
Gabrielle Mérite: when I'm seeing AI mid-journey, like how much of now people who are creative
Gabrielle Mérite: but never got the chance to be educated, have the time to learn Photoshop can produce art.
Gabrielle Mérite: There's so much, obviously it's a little further away from a discussion,
Gabrielle Mérite: but automation and all those tools that are going to make our work practical
Gabrielle Mérite: is also going to allow more people to join the community of designers.
Gabrielle Mérite: Like, designers are going to take a bigger, you know, a bigger umbrella,
Gabrielle Mérite: maybe we'll have more people with different opinions and different backgrounds.
Moritz Stefaner: It's a good point. So the more people we bring in, immediately we have more
Moritz Stefaner: diversity because there's more viewpoints represented. Yeah.
Moritz Stefaner: Oh, now I'm thinking about AI plus design systems.
Moritz Stefaner: That's such a combination, right? If you had Infigma, like you have your little...
Gabrielle Mérite: I've seen some.
Moritz Stefaner: Some people are working on some.
Gabrielle Mérite: It's definitely coming. I'm
Gabrielle Mérite: like, I don't have to do the components by hand anymore. It'd be great.
Moritz Stefaner: That would be kind of nice. Just write a little text. Make all the buttons we need.
Moritz Stefaner: And here we go. Yeah. You could also teach, as you said, a design idea or a
Moritz Stefaner: principle or a certain approach and then just see a hundred variations of that.
Moritz Stefaner: I think that's exciting.
Moritz Stefaner: Cool. So I'm glad there's a positive spin to my slight doubt at the end.
Moritz Stefaner: But I think there is an interesting tension there. And it's what I also want to keep exploring.
Moritz Stefaner: Like how can we make work that lasts and is really like professional and solves
Moritz Stefaner: people's problems, but also still
Moritz Stefaner: keep things exciting and inspiring and provoking also sometimes, right?
Moritz Stefaner: So I think that's the the eternal design tension that we all have to deal with.
Moritz Stefaner: Wonderful. I think that was a great conversation.
Moritz Stefaner: I hope we didn't confuse you all with our design system nerd talk.
Moritz Stefaner: We'll put a few links in the show notes to the examples we discussed, a few resources.
Moritz Stefaner: And yeah, maybe we can do a follow-up episode on AI plus design systems now
Moritz Stefaner: that we're all excited about.
Moritz Stefaner: Yeah. In the meantime, thanks for joining me and see you soon.
Moritz Stefaner: Thank you, Moritz. Bye-bye. Hey, folks. Thanks for listening to Data Stories again.
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