Redesigning Content Design style guidelines for Dropbox employees
As the first Content Designer on the Design Systems team, I reported to the design director, and worked with engineering managers, TPM, and a team of 6 engineers and 6 product designers to align and scale our content and product design systems. In this role, I improved the overall systems for our internal users and created a strategy to implement a unified design system for Dropbox on ZeroHeight.
Design principles I brought to this project:
• Meet our internal users where they are
• Promote adoption without being tyrannical
• Approach strategy and alignment holistically to improve the Dropbox user experience at the systems level
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Designers, Engineers, and Product folks didn’t know that our disparate style guidelines even existed, and if they did, they weren’t implementing them in day-to-day work. My goal was to meet cross-functional partners where they work: on Figma and Confluence.
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Here’s how I did it:
• Centralized all style guidelines and migrated to Confluence
• Removed all lorem ipsum in favor of instructional, annotated components
• Updated design guidelines to include accessibility and internationalization considerations
• Interviewed 20+ design and engineering folks in house and on gold star design systems teams
• Led the information architecture on and migrated all engineering documentation and design documentation to Zero Height -
• All engineering, product design and content design documentation lives in a single-source of truth site
• All Figma components updated and all Confluence documentation set up to integrate with AI
To learn more about how I transformed Dropbox’s Content Design System, reach out to me at nico@nicomk.design.
