How Salesforce Accelerates Design Productivity and Collaboration
Our journey to bring your Salesforce ideas to life with the Lightning Design System
At Salesforce, we’re always listening and learning from our employees, partners, customers, and their customers. Feedback has guided the Lightning Design System’s evolution and innovations and today we’re excited to announce the new Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch.
This free tool is now available for trailblazers of any skill level! It helps anyone with access to Sketch to quickly and easily create high-fidelity Salesforce design concepts.
The Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch automatically updates files with the latest designs to optimize your workflow. It also offers a full icon library, descriptions of patterns, and integrated design guidelines to help you use them. The smart search function allows you to find what you’re looking for fast — even if you’re not sure what it’s called. Visual component browsing with large thumbnails makes it easy to explore design ideas and spark inspiration.
The Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch is packed with features to help anyone prototype in a fraction of the time. Download the Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch now to bring your Salesforce ideas to life!
Below, we’ll explore the evolution of the Lightning Design System, and how the plugin extends its reach. We’ll also examine how the plugin contributes to the next phase of design: Relationship Design.
The Lightning Design System’s Evolution
The Lightning Design System arrived in 2015 as one of the first design systems to market. It was also the world’s first living open-source enterprise design system. It created a common language and tools to accommodate unprecedented growth and align thousands of designers and engineers creating the Salesforce Lightning Experience.
The scalable Lightning Design System serves the entire Salesforce ecosystem of employees, partners, customers, and their customers. The efficient, accessible, and platform-agnostic system supports a variety of technology stacks. It provides design best practices, resources, and tools to increase productivity. These assets enable the creation of beautiful, cohesive product experiences.
Continuous innovation is a hallmark of the Lightning Design System. It has evolved in response to changes in technology and partner and customer needs. New tools have been released over the years that bring the design system directly into daily workflows. This allows for even greater efficiency and collaboration capabilities. In January 2020, the SLDS Validator Extension for Visual Studio Code was released to optimize the developer workflow using the Lightning Design System.
And today, the Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch brings the Lightning Design System directly into the concepting workflow. It saves a significant amount of time by allowing you to use the Lightning Design System from within Sketch.
The Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch Democratizes Design
The Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch extends the design system’s reach beyond those who traditionally identify as designers or developers.
An IT manager and Salesforce Admin can collaborate with their team’s sales manager to build a dashboard for pipeline opportunity management. Instead of using a whiteboard or the back of a napkin, the time-strapped IT manager needs just 10 minutes to create a high-fidelity sketch.
A designer for a Salesforce AppExchange partner optimizes manual processes. Beautiful, consistent, user-friendly designs can now quickly and easily be created with drag-and-drop ease. The Sketch library automatically updates to keep designs current.
These are just some of the workflows the Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch helps to optimize. The workflows are used by Salesforce ecosystem members every day as they collaborate with co-workers and customers.
The people who work together to create, manage, and use the Lightning Design System are its backbone. Its evolution has been community-owned. The Lightning Design System is the most unique design system in the world because of the intricate network of trailblazers it serves and the resources it provides. The paramount focus on supporting partners, customers, and their customers truly is the next era of design.
The Next Chapter: Relationship Design
Design has evolved from an initial focus on product and user experience (UX) design. The aim shifted to service design and enabling multi-touchpoint experiences. Now, the next phase of design is unfolding: Relationship Design. As the name suggests, it means relationships should be at the core of design.
Relationship Design goes beyond service and promotes collaboration between brands and communities. Salesforce continues to pave the way by strengthening relationships with our customers and helping them do the same.
Designing for people is a shared responsibility that involves enabling anyone to create great experiences. To do so requires a set of processes including design guidelines and practical tools like the Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch.
Employee, partner, and customer needs have always been front and center since the Lightning Design System’s beginning. Advancements along the way have led us into a new era of Relationship Design. We’re excited about what the future holds!
The Salesforce Design mission is to enable anyone — from Salesforce admins to IT managers, designers, and developers — to create extraordinary experiences on the Salesforce Platform.
We’ll continue to engage, educate, and support every single member of our community. We’re constantly adding new e-learning opportunities, events— methods and resources like the Lightning Design System plugin for Sketch.
Follow us at @SalesforceUX.
Want to work with us? Contact uxcareers@salesforce.com
Check out the Salesforce Lightning Design System
Special thanks to Chelsea Campos, Brian New, Rebecca Yukelson, John Earle, Yijing Zhang, Alan Weibel, Madeline Davis, and Kirupa Chinnathambi
