A design system pitch for America’s largest liquor distributor
Southern Glazers came to G&S because they needed some help on cleaning up their website. It turned into a long term engagement and multiple projects. Through the years one thing became clear, the initiatives, content, and products were lacking cohesion. Even worse, dev time was long and imprecise.
Southern Glazers is a leader in logistics and tech for the Distribution sector so we wanted to show how a design system could extend that tech first approach to every other aspect of their digital footprint.
We decided to pitch a system and dev workflow as an accelerator program based off of the work I did at J.P. Morgan. Beyond visual cohesion, a coded and documented system would help launch products and pages faster and with better content guidelines.
Managing Design Director - Philip Spradley
Here's an example of customer facing pages. Southern Glazers had up until this point only had a Dark theme to their marketing site. We decided to expand into using light and dark themes. Light for long form articles, dark for shorter pages. Beyond that, we figured we could offer either for internal products and leave it to the user.
Here's an example of a mobile Intranet
A major way to boost employee engagement is to make the transition seamless from internal product to product. The proposed design system can handle all different types of dashboards and workflows.
Example of a custom sales dash
We wanted to show how a design system could enhance the work and engagement of everyone in the company. This shows of how digital signage can automatically plug into warehouse logistics.
Following the program I helped create for J.P. Morgan's design system, I expanded the basic style guide to something that can handle more technical products.
From there, I formalized the primitive and semantic token structure. We kept to a base 8 system for numeric values.
The components quickly fell into place once the top down design decisions were already made.