How I curated design culture & community in DSC JSS
Steve Jobs once said, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do”. So with a love for design and a passion to achieve great things in life I began my journey at DSC JSS. Here’s my story about how I changed the entire design culture at DSC JSS.
Let me begin by sketching out the background. DSC JSS is a community of 40+ students (Designers, Developers, Programmers, Managers) powered by Google Developers. All across the globe, there are 700+ campuses of DSC and JSS is one of them. We at DSC JSS believe in building real-life projects be it web, android, or any tech stack to make the world a better place to live in. We also organize different kinds of events, workshops, seminars, etc to help college students move forward in their careers.
I joined the community in the first week of March’20. I had the responsibility to manage the design team and deliver all the content whenever our community asks for it. Deliverables involved social media posts, posters, banners, YouTube thumbnails, promotional videos of events, and UI for the projects which are developed by our student community with UX inputs. I had a design team of three people including me, a graphic designer, and a video editor.
Beginning with my journey, I found a major problem. In a team of 40 students we had 20+ developers but only 3 designers so the workload was intense. Furthermore, in terms of design assets, we only had a png logo of our community. At that time, all the work of our design team was on Photoshop and it was hard to share heavy Ps & Ai files. Even a single social media post was made from scratch so there was a lack of consistency in branding. After thinking through for some time I came up with a solution. I had a session with our DSC lead and I shifted the entire design team to Figma because of its great collaborative environment. With the help of the components library, it became easy to reuse assets which helped to achieve consistency in the brand.
Successfully reaching my first milestone, I started moving towards the next one. I began building a design system exclusively for DSC JSS. Jumping on through various hurdles, I designed the typography, iconography, illustration, logos, and templates for social media posts and posters. Moreover, with the help of multiple sessions, I taught Figma to all the developers, designers, and managers.
Lastly, reaching towards my last milestone, I could see what I had achieved and what was the outcome. Every member of the community now uses a single source for all the designs and assets. It’s as easy as, open Figma — export assets — use it wherever required. As we all have to be active on social media throughout the year, now if any member of our community gets a new idea for a post, they can simply use the template to edit text, export, and post. This has proven to be a great help.
The design system helped DSC JSS in multiple projects like Chatbot, Where did the stones go (web), Line UP (app), DSC Folios (web), Friction (web), Plasma Donor (app), etc and I hope it continues to do so. For me, this has been a unique kind of problem-solving journey. It’s not just about the projects we did or what we posted on social media, it’s about curating a design culture. I would like to extend my gratitude to all my mentors, friends, and fellow DSC members for helping me throughout this journey.
Here are some links to showcase the work I did in DSC JSS.
Projects:
Social Media Branding:
If you enjoyed reading my journey in DSC JSS Noida as a designer, then do let us know your views in the comments. In case you want to connect with DSC JSS, follow the links below:
LinkedIn| GitHub | Twitter | Instagram
Kudos to Swarina Jaiswal and Pragati Verma for helping me with the story.
