Builders design system – the history
How we went from our first baby steps in 2014 and to todays full scale design system with components for all UIs delivered in both design and code.
At Gjensidige we have designers and developers all over the nordics, working on a plethora of websites, applications, products and services.
At all times, we have thirty-something cross-functional and quite autonomous product teams, working in different business segments with very different users.
Needless to say - a company like ours need a fully functional, unifying design system to be able to scale our operations and still deliver The Gjensidige Experience in everything we do.
GJEFF - our very first initiative
The whole thing startet in 2014. We wantet to find a better way to work together, and created a CSS-library we called GJEFF.
This proved to be a great start, and GJEFF grew fast and became too big for one team to manage. We also struggled with version control, making it difficult for contributors to update the CSS with confidence.
Code was split up into three different packages (CSS, HTML and JS) which had to be kept in sync manually across all teams.
Enter: Gje
2018 we started the job of replacing GJEFF with something else.
We needed something that could work as building blocks for everyone and help us create sustainable and scalable solutions together. Out of this process came our new design system, gjensidige.design, which included @gje, our component library.
The start of Gjensidige Builders
In 2020 we decided to level up on our design system. By that point, we had accumulated a lot of technical debt, as well as a documentation page that was impossible to maintain over time.
So we set out to combine the power of the design system with the power of a modern web platform. We involved all disciplinary roles within design, content design and development, and came up with a more extensive and complete solution that would provide all tools needed to make websites, products and services: Gjensidige Builders.
From 2020 until today
A lot has happened since our beginning in 2020. The Builders design system has grown and gained increasing relevance in all digital initiatives across the Nordics in Gjensidige.
And Builders keeps evolving - new components are made, adjustments keep happening as needs change. Local libraries to accommodate team specific needs are developed. Our design system team works relentlessly to make sure there is a one-to-one coherence between all platforms, be it Figma, Storybook or the code base.