IBM Cloud wins 2024 iF Design Award
I’m excited to announce IBM Cloud has been recognized again this year with the world-renowned iF Design Award. IBM Cloud’s new UI Library, Carbon for Cloud, won in the Professional Concept discipline in the User Interface category.
Carbon for Cloud won over the 132-member jury, made up of independent experts from all over the world, with its design system built for complex computing. The competition was intense: almost 11,000 entries were submitted from 72 countries in hopes of receiving the seal of quality.
About Carbon for Cloud
Creating and managing a cloud computing environment can be an overwhelmingly complex and time-consuming process. Our goal was to help our users craft solutions faster. To achieve this, we enhanced patterns and developed new components to help Cloud users perform their tasks more efficiently and effectively by eliminating steps, clicks, and pages. Additionally, we created distinctive illustrations to express a more efficient product experience for customers. These new patterns and improvements strengthen IBM’s Carbon Design System, using its grid, core components, typography, and visual elements ingrained in IBM’s design legacy.
Carbon for Cloud is an extended design library built for complex cloud-computing that is uniquely IBM. Our combination of minimalism, fluidity, and illumination works holistically using motion in innovative ways to guide users in the management of their cloud resources. This sets us apart from the competition, making our approach more trustworthy, modern, approachable, professional, and impressive.
Built with our users in mind
Carbon for Cloud is built around our users’ technical needs. The unified canvas and animated backgrounds help users orient themselves across the product with directional cues. The layouts are minimal, light and airy to reduce the information density of the complex domain as well as the cognitive load of our users. As users navigate deeper into services, layers of depth are simulated with motion, orienting them in the canvas. This enables users to complete complex tasks with ease regardless of skill level. User studies found that 91% of participants preferred our new designs. One user even stated “I was well-guided going through complicated steps.”
The process behind it
Carbon for Cloud was built to be efficient — saving our users time and effort while delighting in the process. What’s more, Carbon for Cloud also plays a significant role in optimizing the efficiency of our internal design processes and resources. By creating strong guide rails, we shaped the system to be scalable and consistent. This effort involved the wider 80+ person IBM Cloud design community to validate each component, pattern and experience to ensure that the solutions we crafted met their product and user goals. Carbon for Cloud is estimated to save product teams over 2000 hours of work per pattern.
We are thrilled to receive the iF Design Award 2024, as a recognition of the newest and most innovative design concepts across the industry. Carbon for Cloud challenges the boundaries of UI components and patterns to reflect the latest innovations in Cloud technology. It is a result of collaboration between the Carbon design team, the IBM Cloud VMware team and various product teams across IBM Cloud to execute innovative and validated quality experiences at scale. We are incredibly honored to be recognized as the precursors of today’s design challenges and tomorrow’s future-facing experience on Cloud.
— Jeeyoung Yang, Design Lead: Carbon for Cloud
About the iF Design Award
Since 1954, the iF DESIGN AWARD has been recognized as an arbiter of quality for excellent design. The iF Design brand is renowned worldwide for outstanding design services, and the iF DESIGN AWARD is one of the most important design prizes in the world. It honors design achievements in all disciplines: product, packaging, communication and service design, architecture and interior architecture as well as professional concept, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI). All award-winning entries are featured on ifdesign.com.
Congratulations to the winning team:
Kevin Camelo, Stephanie Cree, Adam Habensusz, Maximillian Hammer, Lisa Kaiser, Asha Newsom, Jp Pollard, Nick Stiles, Sándor Vass, Jeeyoung Yang
Special thanks to the volunteer development team managing the Cloud Pattern & Asset Community Library:
Edward Fink, Clayton Huff, Alexander Lewitt, Justin Pomeroy
Bill Grady is Director and Head of Design for IBM Cloud based in Austin, TX. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
