Summary
We built Adobe’s design language, Spectrum, to work on a huge and varied product ecosystem. Adobe’s offering includes dozens of connected desktop, web, and mobile experiences with millions of worldwide users. Some of our products are brand new and some have been in the market for decades. Hear from two of Spectrum’s designers as they give an overview of the design system and answer your questions about building and scaling a design system!
Key Insights
-
•
Spectrum supports over 130 Adobe products across three business units and multiple platforms, requiring a highly scalable and flexible design system.
-
•
The design team does not implement components directly; implementation is handled by separate engineering teams, necessitating strong cross-team collaboration.
-
•
Spectrum evolved from occasional quarterly versions to individual component versioning, improving change tracking and prioritization by implementation teams.
-
•
A transparent design checklist tracks component quality and health with open issues linked to Jira tickets to prioritize fixes and improvements.
-
•
Spectrum Contributions is a sister site hosting 110+ work-in-progress components, increasing visibility and community feedback outside the core team.
-
•
A design token repository serves as a single source of truth for all component attributes like color and sizing, ensuring consistency and ease of updates.
-
•
Nate Baldwin highlights naming as the hardest ongoing challenge due to multiple platforms and diverse teams; content strategist Jess Satel assists in establishing a clear terminology.
-
•
Spectrum balances consistency and respect for platform-specific UI conventions by either skinning native components or documenting deviations explicitly.
-
•
Accessibility and color theming are managed by defining target contrast ratios first, then generating compliant colors via the custom tool Leonardo.
-
•
The Spectrum team fosters community via multiple engagement channels including Spectrum Guild quarterly meetings, town halls, office hours, and Slack, improving documentation and prioritization.
Notable Quotes
"Our team does not actually build the components consumed by product teams. Implementation teams report to their respective engineering and product orgs."
"We moved from versioning the entire system quarterly to individually versioning components, so changes are easier to track and prioritize."
"Naming things — components, properties, parts — is the hardest thing and it never stops. Thankfully, we have Jess Satel, our amazing content strategist."
"We try to keep things as consistent as possible in terms of the API but document where platforms need to deviate to be good citizens of their environment."
"Instead of choosing colors then checking contrast, we flipped the process and started by defining contrast ratio targets and then generating colors to meet them."
"We capture component design decisions and health transparently with checklists; unchecked items correspond to open tickets for prioritization."
"We have weekly meetings with implementation teams to design APIs, discuss progress, and address issues to ensure alignment."
"Spectrum Contributions site gives visibility to work-in-progress components, making users more vocal with feedback that we can capture and raise."
"Our UI kits are generated through JavaScript based on tokens, meaning less manual work, fewer errors, and consistent updates across themes and platforms."
"Spectrum is about empowering collaboration across products, disciplines, and clouds — not just providing tools but supporting people using the system."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Trauma changes the brain—it rewires the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus forever."
Carol Scott Melissa EgglestonAvoid Harming Your Team and Users: Promoting Care and Brand Reputation with Trauma-Informed UX Practices
February 5, 2025
"Being fluent in multiple data languages and understanding behavioral and attitudinal data will be essential."
Lija Hogan Milan Mijatovic Sam Proulx Louis RosenfeldThree Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
March 15, 2024
"Augmented reality is an entirely new paradigm and we haven’t quite figured out accessibility for that yet."
Sam ProulxMobile Accessibility and You
June 9, 2022
"We organize our work around our life, instead of our life around our work."
Ana FerreiraDesigning Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team in Six Countries
January 8, 2024
"I used GPT-4 to retag 1,200 blog posts, reducing an estimated 10–12 hours of tedious manual work to about a third of that time."
Jorge ArangoScale Smart: AI-Powered Content Organization Strategies
September 24, 2024
"Giving senior leadership a shared language for design helped product teams better communicate what needed focus and why."
Chris MosesStretching the Definition of DesignOps with Product Development
November 7, 2018
"The LLM gave many different answers for the same passage, each time reporting it was one hundred percent confident."
Trisha Causley[Demo] Complexity in disguise: Crafting experiences for generative AI features
June 5, 2024
"There’s a perception that generative AI is gonna change everything, but I think it’s gonna transform, not totally overhaul mine."
Clara Kliman-SilverUX Futures: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Design
June 7, 2023
"I worked through a volunteer task force of 15 people across the company to drive radical design collaboration."
Michael PolivkaScaling Design through Relationship Maps
November 7, 2017
