decentdao

We made significant improvements to the foundations of our designs this month, introducing a design language upon which we will further improve and systems our existing screens. 

First massive steps toward converting our designs from a series of disconnected UI patterns into a proper MVP design system.

ATL raised. 🐦‍🔥 // Design, music, coffee, bikes, community. //
Head of Design @decentdao

These changes connect our existing designs to Decent’s brand and begin defining our own unique design language. We started by returning to the vision and auditing what we had in place to figure out where to make the right changes.

Starting with the backbone, we created new grids and column guides to direct spacing and composition of elements. Too many new screens and components had been built without any unifying structure to ensure quality consistency across the board. We were basically copy/pasting and doing our best guesswork to keep things even.

Spacing guidelines were created to further assist with padding needs and vertical rhythm. 

We build on a 4px baseline grid to allow for precision and flexibility across devices and screens.

It wasn’t always clear which type style to use and we had several styles with the same parameters so unintuitive selection happened often and slowed down the iterative process (ie obsessing over the type style instead of the overall solution)

We purged over 50% of our existing type styles to create a streamlined stack with clear hierarchy. Semantic names aid with style selection within a design.

We also dabbled in a first set of design tokens. Much more for us to convene with our dev team on to fully connect design to code here.

Finally, many of our dense design screens suffered from lack of clear visual hierarchy. Everything started to look the same size. We applied our new type stack across all designs to improve hierarchy and reduce cognitive fatigue for our users scanning over a screen.

These updates are not live on app.decentdao.org just yet, but the entire team is heads down rolling out a massive set of UX improvements so keep an eye out over the coming weeks and share your feedback!