Boris Soliz
UI Designer
GE needed a design system that was able to create a wide variety of GE branded experiences - from basic emails to comprehensive web solutions. The design system had to be agnostic to any framework and be extremely lightweight. Alongside the PREDIX design system, which solved design problems within the Industrial Internet Space, the Core Design System solved all other design-related issues within GE for the master brand expression. The Core Design System language was built to connect GE brand characteristics to specific design principles: Bold, Simple, Focused and Personal.
As a team, we came up with the entire design system from multiple workout sessions within our team and abroad. We created multiple iterations and explorations on what we were trying to achieve and how we plan on establishing the system as something that will benefit the entire company.
I also helped design multiple variations on what we wanted to achieve with the design system in terms of simplicity, robust and expandable to all different variations designers would create using the system. I designed scenarios where UX Designers would use the system for home pages, product pages, email campaigns, e-commerce pages and all in between. This allowed the team to gain a better understanding of the limits of the components for the design system and if we needed to revisit or create other components to address those limits.
I helped the team by setting the groundwork for the entire design system in Sketch and training my team on how to use it to achieve the results we wanted. The overall goal was to deliver the design system via our internal website and have downloadable files via GitHub or our internal site.
The CORE Design System also had to be community-driven. We wanted the system to be shaped by contributors from all GE UX designers and developers around the world. I helped the team brainstorm on this idea and after some workouts internally, we came up with a great design and idea for this community-driven website and initiative.
I also started experimenting for the first time on some animation for the website. I used Principle to create the animation and presented it to our team, for inspiration and to get other ideas rolling.
I also helped write articles that added to this community. This helped spark some more articles written by other designers, developers, etc to further enhance the site and its capabilities. This in turn was then shared within the team to make the CORE Design System much more robust for all GE.
The CORE design system is still being used today. The Design System we built has helped multiple teams across GE create their brand, scale their products and unify the overall GE brand. We even saw the CORE design System being used to create Web Applications - something we did not intend for it to do, but because of its ease of use, developers started to use it as a tool for their applications.
