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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +title: Porsche Design System |
| 3 | +date: 2023-08-30 |
| 4 | +image: /assets/blog/pds/hero.jpg |
| 5 | +descriptionShort: The Porsche Design System provides all the fundamental UXI guidelines and pattern-based web components to build brand driven, consistent and intuitive designs for digital Porsche products. Marcel Bertram, Specialist Digital Marketing UI/UX at Porsche, explains why this project was published as an open-source project and what his team learned along this way. |
| 6 | +author: |
| 7 | + name: Porsche Design System |
| 8 | + description: The Porsche Design System provides the design fundamentals and elements for efficiently creating aesthetic and high-quality web applications, including easy-to-use Figma and UX Pin libraries, coded Web Components and comprehensive usage guidelines. Everything is built and tested following the Porsche quality standards and corporate design principles. |
| 9 | + image: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/porsche-design-system/porsche-design-system/main/packages/crest/src/porsche-crest%403x.png |
| 10 | + slug: https://designsystem.porsche.com/ |
| 11 | +readTime: 5min |
| 12 | +--- |
| 13 | + |
| 14 | +<ImageText imageSrc="/assets/blog/pds/1.jpg" imageAlt="Marcel Bertram" |
| 15 | + title="Tell us a little more about yourself, your role at Porsche and what topics drive you."> |
| 16 | + Being part of the company for more than twelve years, I had the opportunity |
| 17 | + to be part of the very first agile product teams at Porsche. During my |
| 18 | + journey through various roles in marketing with a focus on digital products, |
| 19 | + we started a strategy for pushing the practice of qualitative UX design with |
| 20 | + the first shared service and inner-source system product: The digital |
| 21 | + Porsche Design System. The main goals are to ensure an efficient but still |
| 22 | + high-quality, brand-consistent implementation of our design language across |
| 23 | + all our digital touchpoints. |
| 24 | +</ImageText> |
| 25 | + |
| 26 | +<ImageText imageSrc="/assets/blog/pds/2.jpg" imageAlt="Marcel Bertram" left |
| 27 | + title="You are currently maintaining Porsche's open-source project Porsche Design System on GitHub. How would you explain your project to a five-year-old? What problem does your project solve for Porsche?"> |
| 28 | + The Porsche Design System is comparable to a Lego set that offers |
| 29 | + ready-to-use building blocks (coded and designed components) and a clear |
| 30 | + manual on how and where to use them. This set allows us to build |
| 31 | + high-qualitative frontends, ranging from marketing pages to digital |
| 32 | + applications. By supporting multiple popular frameworks such as React, |
| 33 | + Angular and Vue, continuously testing for compatibility with a wide |
| 34 | + range of browsers and creating a growing set of re-usable components, we |
| 35 | + made a huge step ahead in the industry, which I am still proud of. Our |
| 36 | + design system unlocks capacities among all Porsche design and |
| 37 | + development teams that otherwise would have to reinvent the wheel by |
| 38 | + adapting, implementing, and verifying the design guide on their own – |
| 39 | + multiplied by all our available teams. We have an extremely high |
| 40 | + standard regarding quality, performance, and aesthetics for our |
| 41 | + products. The PDS standardizes our digital products and creates one |
| 42 | + single system we can collectively optimize. |
| 43 | +</ImageText> |
| 44 | + |
| 45 | +<ImageText imageSrc="/assets/blog/pds/3.jpg" imageAlt="Marcel Bertram" |
| 46 | + title="By publishing the Porsche Design System as an open-source project, you have made a big step ahead in our FOSS movement. What was your initial motivation to take this path? Can you tell us why you have chosen to release your project on GitHub?"> |
| 47 | + There are several reasons why we agreed on open sourcing the Porsche |
| 48 | + Design System. We wanted to drastically lower the barrier to access and |
| 49 | + use our system and thus lift the adoption and engagement. The Porsche |
| 50 | + Group encompasses many subsidiaries and has a broad partner network. |
| 51 | + Instead of hiding our repositories on an on-premises platform, we made |
| 52 | + it publicly available, allowing every single team, partner, and supplier |
| 53 | + to access and use the PDS without any hassle. At the same time, we have |
| 54 | + removed the complexity of having to worry about access and |
| 55 | + authentication – saving us time and effort and lower the risk of |
| 56 | + frustration with our consumers. |
| 57 | + |
| 58 | + But this step was also a model of success from a not purely pragmatic |
| 59 | + standpoint. We are already receiving the first code changes from individual |
| 60 | + contributors outside of the Porsche Group. Bringing the Porsche brand to a |
| 61 | + developer portal such as GitHub is a brilliant side-effect of this move. |
| 62 | + Our fans and customers can directly connect with us, join a growing community, |
| 63 | + and experience the Porsche brand in a totally new way. It is thrilling to see |
| 64 | + how the number of stars on GitHub is growing and people really liking what we |
| 65 | + are doing. |
| 66 | +</ImageText> |
| 67 | + |
| 68 | +<ImageText imageSrc="/assets/blog/pds/4.jpg" imageAlt="Marcel Bertram" left |
| 69 | + title="What did you learn along the way? What were the benefits of this strategy for you, your team and Porsche?"> |
| 70 | + Publishing the Porsche Design System under a free and open license simplified a |
| 71 | + lot of things for us. Not only did we reduce the complexity of access |
| 72 | + management, as stated previously, but also communication is drastically |
| 73 | + simplified. While questions and issues around the PDS have reached us through |
| 74 | + various channels, everything can now be found on one single platform, allowing |
| 75 | + others to search for already solved problems or give feedback on our components. |
| 76 | + |
| 77 | + One thing we learned is the importance of automation and a high test-coverage |
| 78 | + within our repositories. Ensuring both enabled us to reduce the time needed to |
| 79 | + review and merge new pull requests. We are therefore looking forward to |
| 80 | + receiving further contributions – both from inside and outside of the company! |
| 81 | + |
| 82 | + Ultimately, coding and collaborating in the wild also proved that we are paying |
| 83 | + more attention to ensuring compliance, quality, and security of our projects. |
| 84 | + Transparency is thus not only a freedom, but also a precursor for advancing in |
| 85 | + our field. |
| 86 | +</ImageText> |
| 87 | + |
| 88 | +<ImageText imageSrc="/assets/blog/pds/5.jpg" imageAlt="Marcel Bertram" |
| 89 | + title="With a glimpse into the future: What are your further plans regarding FOSS Contributions? Who would you like to see next joining our FOSS Contributor community?"> |
| 90 | + We already discussed the idea of generalizing the Porsche Design System. |
| 91 | + Currently, PDS is limited to creating Porsche-branded applications. In |
| 92 | + the spirit of FOSS, we would like to extend our design system to a |
| 93 | + framework that can incorporate any arbitrary corporate identity. It |
| 94 | + would be cool to see other brands facilitating, contributing and |
| 95 | + collaborating based on our system. |
| 96 | +</ImageText> |
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