Creating a design system to empower Lazard's creative and technical teams.

Overview

Lazard is a financial company with a long history of stability and prominence. However, over time the company began losing pace with competitors who invested heavily in creating public/customer-facing digital experience. Hot Paper Lantern was engaged to assist in a variety of tasks, one of those tasks was to create a method where their various creative teams would be able to access brand materials and standards to minimize or eliminate brand variance in the products/promos the company activates.

Roles: Experience Lead and Dev Strat

Modern buildings in Manhattan
Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan

Creative
Workshop

The engagement kicked off with me facilitating a creative workshop with the client and the HPL design team. These types of workshops are broken into phases and milestones, which follow a fairly strict schedule and seek to accomplish certain objectives.

For this workshop we had a few hours to get from conceptual vision to low-fidelity sketch wires – a fair challenge. We ended up reaching our goal and filling a robust parking lot full of future ideas to be implemented after our aggressive phase one timeline.

Creative workshop using a whiteboard and sticky notes.
Med-fidelity mock from the interactive prototype.

Prototype

From the creative workshop, we began our sprints. By having design and development collaborating concurrently, we were able to produce a tremendous amount of interactivity in a very short amount of time.

From start to finish the process took just shy of 4 weeks to complete the baseline requirements – of the full design system. Again – we were cranking.

Outcome

When finished, the system was able to support product designers and developers responsible for creating brand-consistent interactive experiences for customers. By integrating the guide, brand assets and replicable codebase, we were able to create a single source for any creative needs pertaining to the brand.

The final step was to create a brand voice section, so those focusing more predominantly in written creative would have all guiding creative principles for developing content, messaging and supporting copy.

Design thinking? 😉

Does your team use a design system?

If not, please know – you can save time, minimize waste/redundancy and achieve scale by implementing an easy to access design system. Shoot me an email for how to get started, caleb@freemanhelp.com.