For nearly a decade, Sparkbox has been working with clients to create and evolve design systems. If you’re a regular reader of the Foundry, you’re already familiar with resources like the Anatomy of a Design System, the Design System Maturity Model, and our annual Design Systems Survey. You may have even joined us for some of the many UnConference learning events that we’ve held in recent years to share our findings and lead discussions about design systems.
Many of the recurring questions that we receive during our UnConference events are related to design system tooling. Everyone is seeking the right path forward: How do they increase adoption? How do they create a single source of truth for users and contributors? How do they document best practices and make them available to all team members? How do they ensure that design and code remain aligned, even with multiple teams and contributors involved? Is there even a single solution that will solve all these problems?
Every Sparkbox project begins with an onboarding process that allows us to deeply understand the challenges and needs of our clients. This onboarding is customized to the unique needs of each client, but often includes user interviews, focus groups, competitive analysis, and stakeholder interviews among other things. The result is a comprehensive set of recommendations that we believe lead to long-term success for our clients, including tooling, cultural priorities, educational recommendations, and more.
Sparkbox has recently had the opportunity to work closely with zeroheight, a design system tooling option that creates a central hub for all the individuals and teams working with a design system. Our exploration of zeroheight’s offerings—including work done alongside our clients—showed us that zeroheight has the power to solve some of the critical challenges facing many of our design system clients.
Today we’re glad to announce our partnership with zeroheight. Sparkbox is not the kind of company that holds a hammer and sees only nails. We always seek creative and innovative solutions based on individual client needs. We truly believe that having zeroheight as one of the tools in our toolbox will be a huge benefit to our clients. Working with zeroheight, we’ll be able to offer fast and comprehensive design system solutions that will allow our clients to focus their attention on other challenges, such as cultural change, education, and evolution of the core system.
We’re excited to share more about this partnership as it moves forward. You can learn more about our partnership and shared approach by visiting the zeroheight website or attending a Design System Triage event hosted by Ben Callahan and zeroheight’s Dan Donald.
