Design Systems

Design systems aren't new. Style guides have since the dawn of print design included enough detail, and actual components to be reused over and over again. 

4ourth Mobile has been creating digital design systems since the early 2000s, long before the term was defined, but in the same way with scaleable design widgets created hand in hand with polymorphic code widgets. 

4ourth Mobile Laminar Design System

Our experience in design systems has long led us to understand that they are all based on the needs of end users, customized to the structure and style of your organization. 

Laminar is a single set of proven heuristics, frameworks of components, and questions to be answered to quickly make a complete design system customized for you.  

Laminar flow is the movement of a fluid medium, air around an airplane or liquid in a pipe, where all the fluid moves in a uniform speed and direction.

Laminar is fluid not fixed or responsive only, consistent not expedient ir capricious, holistic not reductionist or dogmatic. 

A framework for your digital products

…not a design system because we strongly believe the world has enough sites and apps that look the same. If you want to look like everyone else, by all means just tell your team to use Google Material Design,or copy whatever else you like, but if you want GOOD THINGS... 

Legacy information we’ll be changing soon…

Building a design system for your website is all the rage now, but we’ve been doing them for over fifteen years.

A lot of design systems are entirely about coding first. So they only work for the web, and for one web technology. Change the site over to a new platform? You’ll need a new design system. Have third parties — or other divisions and sub products — running various parts of your website? Nope, no such thing as a design system exists to these folks.

Our approach starts with the basics that all human facing systems must share to be usable, but then is organic, considering your whole organization, and the entire experience customers have.

Our design systems are — as much as possible — technology agnostic. We define how the end product should look and work, how to use labels and icons, how to make every bit bolt together. And then, your engineers can use that to create any digital product with totally consistent results. It also serves as an excellent guide for letting us, or any other UX design team, do the detailed design while staying consistent with a single corporate digital design vision.

Contact 4ourth Mobile today, to start creating a design system for your digital products.