Goldman Sachs
Creating a new imaginative and unified design system to serve as a global foundation to inform their brand expression across products and platforms.
Introduction
In the midst of a global brand redesign, Goldman Sachs and R/GA partnered to update the Marcus Design System. This effort included consolidating multiple design systems to build a single global foundation that will inform their brand expression across products and platforms through a unified and cohesive user experience. As a design lead on the project, my role was to make decisions about how the new brand expression would come to life across both web and mobile platforms, and oversee the building of the components and handoff to developers.
PROJECT TYPE
Final Outcome
One universal design system that could flex across both web and mobile platforms including theming for both light and dark modes. This resulted in a 40% reduction in build time, and an 80% reduction in file size.
year
2023
role
Associate Creative Director
PROCESS
To start, we conducted a three-week audit and collaborated with web, iOS and Android developers from Goldman Sachs to resolve inconsistencies in their current system, identify and find solutions to update components that didn't flex with content needs, and pinpoint any components that simply were not being used in the platform.
In addition, we also created a new UI language based on the recent rebranding of Goldman Sachs. Building off of the updated color palette and new fonts, we began exploring how we could bring this to life on Marcus with the vision of “Accessible Luxury” acting as our north star. Creating a spectrum of approaches ranging from low-touch effort to a complete revamp, we worked with both teams to define the desired prominence of this new brand identity within the end product.
After landing on a visual direction, we first developed foundational elements like color, type, grids, spacing specs and icons. Our team of designs were all able to build our component library from this universal system, ensuring consistency across styling and structure. We put together a sprint plan to design and build the 40+ components consisting of design, building variants, testing, and documentation. We reduced the number of variants from thousands to hundreds, each built to solve a wider ranges of content needs.
RESULTS
Our final deliverable was one universal design system that could flex across both web and mobile platforms. Every component was built in both light mode and dark mode and rebuilt with Figma best practices in place. This resulted in a 40% reduction in build time, and an 80% reduction in file size. Our collaboration with the development team helped create one language that designers and developers could both speak, speeding up time to launch. Finally, we’ve helped Goldman Sachs launch a new company-wide rebrand across the Marcus platform, solidifying their position as a leading financial firm.
“We have much more thoughtful unification across our platforms now. This will help make our interfaces and journeys so much more consistent.”
- Goldman Sachs Design System Lead