WWW… Wednesday! Zeroheight

by Taylor Slattery | April 21, 2021

Designing branding is fun. Creating cohesive design systems that outline their use in a visually elegant way is also fun. Trying to get everyone to adhere to the system, on the other hand, is not fun. Lengthy pdfs or complicated directories make it hard to find what you’re looking for and any friction in this process hurts the odds of adherence.

Traditional approaches to design systems can also be hard to update, let alone make sure that everyone sees those updates. Within an organization, there are a variety of different teams who each need access to specific types of assets. Those working in design, development, and marketing each need to be able to find what they’re looking for without having to jump through hoops to do so.

Decentralized guides for different departments can be confusing and add unnecessary hurdles when it comes time to push out updates. The sheer number of moving parts and the complexity of their needs is what makes maintaining brand cohesion across different platforms difficult.

Zeroheight solves these problems and more by serving as a single source of truth for the whole organization. Regardless of department, everyone can refer back to a single document and find assets and guidelines for their use in a simple, easy to navigate solution.

Zeroheight features robust integration with the tools your teams are already using. Integration with Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD and Storybook allows for design and code assets to be stored together in a single location. Additional types of content like prototypes, roadmaps, and videos can be added to provide further context for the use of the system and its various components.

You can do more than just publish your finished style guide, though. Zeroheight has collaborative features that make it easier to create systems that work for everyone. Feedback can be left in context so you know exactly where the problem is, without searching. Components can then be inspected, addressing problems in real-time and updating the guide as a whole by publishing iterations.

If you need to keep things under wraps while in development, permissions and passwords can be managed to keep things on a need-to-know basis until updates are pushed out to the whole organization. This centralized documentation makes publishing new releases a breeze and ensures everyone is viewing the most recent iteration.

You can view a collection of design systems created with zeroheight here. Zeroheight is free to try. You can learn more and sign up here.

Taylor is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Taylor is a graphic designer, illustrator, and Design Lead at Weirdsleep.

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