Building multiple consistent, practical, and brand-appropriate web applications across a company with an agreed design system could be more effective.

In the past year, I was part of a team that built, designed, and implemented the latest design system for Thomson Reuters. By taking all we knew about our brand, product, accessibility, content, and development needs, we built the Saffron Design System.

During a compressed timeline, our team divided the primary components, and my responsibility was to design and develop all the form elements. While involved in this process, I kept several things in mind.

• Communication with the team is paramount to ensure high design standards.

• Consistent naming and embedding of all components 

• A consistent framework for the options to ensure they understand how to use each component

• Accessibility is built into the core of all components.

Upon the launch of the design system, I was asked to be a design system ambassador. Ambassadors help design systems scale across the organization. By distributing design decisions and responsibilities across our organization, designers have more autonomy and can influence and evolve our standards.