How Elite Digital Agencies Create Transformative Design Workflows
User Stories
Zeplin Crew
May 2022@zeplin
Digital agency, Organic, designs and implements incredible branding for a long laundry list of influential clients. Focused on creating brands that stand the test of time with impeccable UX and cutting edge design, Organic needs design workflows to be repeatable and scalable for their large clients.
At Harmony, our user summit, we invited Technical Director, Daniel Viedma, and former Creative Director, Lara Horowitz, to talk about how they use Zeplin to accomplish the design workflows they need.
Daniel and Lara spoke about how they used Zeplin when helping their client, National Instruments (NI), a multinational automated testing manufacturer, rebrand. With such a large client, they needed a tool that could accommodate the size of the client and the volume of work that needed to be done.
Scaling components with Zeplin
One of the biggest challenges Daniel and Lara ran into was just the sheer volume of work needed to rebrand a company the size of National Instruments. As a $1 billion company, National Instruments needed many more components and details than already existed when working on the rebrand. Daniel and Lara turned to Zeplin to begin creating a scalable process in their design workflows.
When they began the rebrand, NI only had 33 components for the design and development teams to work with. These 33 components covered the client’s entire website, leaving a small foundation for the teams to build upon. The first thing Organic set out to do was to massively scale the design system, ultimately growing it to over 700 components within Zeplin and counting. This gave both teams a strong foundation that allowed them to continue creating more components as needed to accommodate all of NI’s needs.
“ Zeplin enables us to move at a high velocity in our work and for our clients.”
— Lara Horowitz, former Creative Director, Organic
Creating structure and organization with design workflows
For the Organic team, the next issue to tackle was creating a structured, easily repeatable process. Daniel and Lara found that using Zeplin helped them create a repeatable workflow, from naming components to organizing those components into an intuitive structure for team members across the organization.
"Zeplin provides a level of organization that's infused into all the tools that we use," says Daniel. "Even the nomenclature from Zeplin is now used in Figma."
Zeplin has helped Organic create and use consistent design workflows between design and development, aligning both teams throughout the creation process. Not only were teams aligned for the National Instruments projects, but Zeplin has also maintained this alignment for other endeavors as well. Repeatable, organized, structured workflows help the team to work rapidly and efficiently.
Software integrations help teams work quickly
Along with repeatable, scalable workflows, Zeplin allows the Organic team to integrate the software they use daily into their design workflows. Zeplin’s integration with Figma makes it that much easier for teams to share files, maintain version control, and stay focused on their projects.
“In the pre-Zeplin days, we spent hours documenting annotations and complex design notes to pass off to multiple different audiences. With Zeplin, we now have time back to spend designing and collaborating with our team members. This has opened up an even more optimal process, not only for the creative team, but also for a team of teams.”
— Lara Horowitz, Organic
For Organic, Zeplin has been a game-changer in helping create design workflows that allow teams to scale projects and work quickly. Zeplin helps the team keep projects organized and easy to manage, a huge benefit for Organic when it comes to large-scale clients.
Want to see how Zeplin can help your team create repeatable design workflows?
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