In a world where most IT products are fighting for a bigger audience, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a visually pleasing and smooth user experience.

Here at NewsKit, one of our products is a Design System which enables different NewsUK titles to build better products, faster. One of our goals from a quality perspective is to deliver multiple components that render correctly. But how can that be achieved, especially in a reality where we have a variety of devices, browsers, resolutions and capabilities, across various platforms? It looks like an impossible mission. But is it, though?

Where do we start?

Let’s face it…

Since we started NewsKit we’ve learnt a thing or two about theming, in this article we will go through different approaches, discuss associated trade-offs and how we’ve solved these challenges. It’s fair to say we were a little naive on how complex building a multi-brand design system would be when we started this journey! If you’re embarking on a design system project or looking to adopt NewsKit in your teams this article should help to get you up to speed on the different approaches available.

Theming is a core cross-cutting concern of a multi-brand design system, without a standardised approach…

I’m going to tell you a quick story about why News UK decided to build a design system and why what we’ve ended up creating is so much more…

(if you’re not familiar with design systems, you can get up to speed here)

Why a design system?

News UK is one of the largest publishing companies in the UK. We own big news brands and publishers; The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, and Times Literary Supplement and we’re increasingly investing in broadcasting, since the acquisition of Wireless Group in 2016 (Times Radio, talkSPORT, talkRADIO and Virgin Radio). …