It's been awhile. Here's what's up with Design Systems.

The team

With Chase's departure, Bill Foehring has stepped in as the design systems lead. Additionally, we are thrilled to welcome engineering director Maurice Rabb to Design Systems. He is partnering with Bill on Racine and other technical aspects of our system.

Together, we are continuing to deliver on the Design System's promise to provide tools, products, and services that reduce friction for creators at Sprout.

Our work

Onboarding & process

Working to onboard Maurice has allowed us to revisit and reevaluate some of our processes and workflows. Adjusting, fine-tuning, learning, and documenting has been a regular part of our everyday work.

Knowledge transfer & maintenance

With Chase's departure came a fair amount of knowledge transfer. We did our best to cover every topic and capture as much information as possible before he left. Inevitably, a laundry list of loose ends presented itself (think access tokens, permissions, etc.) and required us to dedicate some time to repairing those operations. Rest assured, the machine is oiled.

Component development

First off, big shoutout to Shane Brunson and Mike Rivet for their contributions to the long-awaited date pickers and TokenInput! "Did you say date pickers and TokenInput?!" Yes, we did. Design Systems has been busy ushering date picker and TokenInput into Racine and Seeds.

Date pickers include our SingleDatePicker as well as our DateRangePicker. The single date picker is best for single date selections whereas the date range picker is best for, you guessed it, date ranges.

Check out Datepicker and TokenInput on Seeds.

Contribution & redesign

Some of you may be asking yourselves:

"what happened to all that awesome, big picture work that Design Systems was asking me about?"

Great question. Moving into 2021, we plan to revisit the work we've already completed on contributions and the Seeds redesign. We'll make sure that our plans still make sense for the coming year and then prioritize and staff accordingly to make that work a reality.

Hiring

Finally, on the subject of staffing, we're hiring! Design leadership has plans to add management and creative technologists to the design systems team this year. For more information or if you know someone who would be a great fit, don't hesitate to reach out!

Noteworthy updates

• Welcome, Maurice!
• Published seeds-networkcolors v2.6.0 - includes updated Pinterest and LinkedIn values
• Published TokenInput
• Published Datepicker
• Launched updated color docs thanks to Katie Powell and our friends on Brand
• Security fixes and dependency upgrades for both Seeds and Racine
• Expected launch of Figma webhooks API & Slack integration overhaul later this month

Parting reminder

In case this got lost in all of the excitement of the holiday season, be sure to check out our contribution workflow on Seeds!

Have questions, feedback, or ideas for the Design Systems team? Send us an email or check out our wiki page to learn more about the team.

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