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Product://remote Session Spotlight: Guardrails or handcuffs? Building creative and sustainable design systems by Mark Boulton

In the leadup to Product://remote we’re putting the spotlight on the 2 dozen fantastic sessions we have lined up for attendees.

Guardrails or handcuffs? Building creative and sustainable design systems

By Mark Boulton

The holy grail for design systems is akin to designing a game like chess or football: Create a system with simple, understandable and communicable rules that empower creative freedom and expression with limitless possibility.

Modern digital design systems take a different path: create modular, reusable components so we can quickly build on-brand products at scale.

The latter is always sold with the promise of the former.

In this talk, Mark will outline his approach to building design system products and teams that acknowledge the tensions that exist between the need to scale and the need to differentiate.

About Mark Boulton

Mark is a designer who’s been building design systems for the past twenty years, either in-house building and leading delivery teams, or running his design agency.

Until recently, Mark was Head of Digital at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) where he led a team building a design system for life sciences, and trying to figure out how to scale design in a scientific environment where the bottom line was discovery not dollars. Prior to working at EMBL, Mark was Design Director at Monotype where he led scaling of a new design system across the company’s portfolio of products. Previously Mark ran a design studio working on design systems for CERN, Al Jazeera, and ESPN.

Mark lives in Wales with his wife, two daughters and a dog that thinks it’s a bear.

See two dozen world-leading experts on all product design, management and ownership at Product://Remote November 2020

Product://Remote takes place across the month of November (and just a bit of December), and features two dozen world-leading experts on all things product designing management at an amazing price, just $195 before October 16th.

Learn more and register now

Conveniently timed for attendees from the North American West Coast, right across the pacific to Hong Kong and Singapore, Japan and beyond connect–with your peers at Code.

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I’ve been admiring the Web Directions events for years, and was honored to be part… What a fantastic event!

Ethan Marcotte Inventor of 'Responsive Web Design'