The Problem
What started out as a single accelerator in Boulder, Techstars had scaled to over 150 countries worldwide, and amassed over a decade of inconsistent styles, leading to a disjointed user experience, and made our apps & websites difficult to maintain.
In 2020, we led a rebrand for Techstars and this was the perfect opportunity to rethink our design system, or lack thereof.
The Team
I led design & strategy for this project and worked with another designer and the engineering team to implement it. We built the system in figma in Agile two-week sprints and worked with the engineering team to implement it in Storybook and across our digital properties.
My Process
Discovery
We conducted an audit of our 30+ apps and websites to 1) see where we went wrong and 2) all of the scenarios, screen sizes, and platforms that the system would have to accommodate.
Surprise surprise, our audit discovered a frankenstein of same but different colors & typography, loosely defined unrepeatable components, and most of our stuff was an accessibility nightmare.