On January 2022, I had the opportunity to participate in a real design adventure at the Design Systems Hackathon hosted by the fantastic Silvia Bormüller and Thaís Santos from Into Design Systems.
My team had five different nationalities (Austria, Brazil, Italy, UK, and Uruguay), three different time zones, and only 24h to present our design system project. Luckily, everyone is so talented, creative, and committed that we ended up having a lot of fun, and making new friends while running against the clock.
Our idea was to create a plugin that could find an easy and quick way to manage multiple text styles for different breakpoints, without manually applying the changes of the styles for each breakpoint. Additionally, this plugin would export or copy media-query automatically generated, choosing from px, rem, em, or vw.
This is how our process went:
- The Uruguayan designer and I had a timezone advantage, so we would design the UX flow for the plugin and hand it to the European designers before they woke up;
- When the three others woke up, they revised our flow and began the presentation and the UI of the plugin;
- Then, we reunited and finished the presentation together just in time for the final round, besides deciding who would be the speaker;
- We voted for the UK designer since he was the only native English speaker, and it would be easier for the others to understand him since we all have language barriers;
Although we were exhausted and deprived of sleep during this weekend’s mission, we all got along and had a lot of fun putting our minds to work together.
It was also interesting to see how the other teams developed their ideas. There were so many stimulating pitches from other design enthusiasts, I think it was a really healthy competition for the design system community.
In the end, we did win a prize with our plugin idea: Responsive Textstyler.