®2024

UAL Design System

As one of the world’s leading institutions for art and design education, University of the Arts London (UAL) places a strong emphasis on the quality of its digital experiences. To support a growing digital estate, we established a unified design system that became the source of truth for digital design across the university. The design system brought consistency, accessibility, and scalability to UAL’s products, enabling teams to create cohesive user experiences while streamlining collaboration between design and development.

Client

University of the Arts London

DELIVERABLES

Project Planning UI Design UX Design

DURATION

2022 - 2025 (Current)

Role

Lead UI Designer

Landing page of curent UAL Design system subdomain.

Screenshot of Figma file on 'breadcrumbs' component refactoring.

Screenshot of Figma file on pages and mapping for UAL DEsign system subdomain.

Problem Statement & Goals

UAL lacked a single source of truth for digital design. As different teams and products evolved independently, inconsistencies emerged across the digital estate, resulting in fragmented user experiences, duplicated effort, and design solutions that did not always align with UAL’s wider brand identity. Without a unified framework, maintaining quality, accessibility, and consistency at scale became increasingly difficult for both designers and developers.

Project Scope & Results

For this project I was tasked with leading the user interface design of the design system; This ranged from designing landing pages for the design system microsite (subdomain under the main UAL website), mapping out the user journey of these pages, reviewing and refactoring components of the existing design system, and aligning and organising with other teams on their contributions to this project. The project was in phases; Phase 1 designing and mapping out introductory pages, refactoring and adding in components, and aligning with some content management sites (CMS). I was successful in leading the team in mapping out the introductory pages and designing some of them in Figma. I also handled some of the core foundational elements - typography and spacing for the design system - and some components refactoring (reworking the functionality of these components)