Sunweb group is a big online touroperator that owns many different brands (e.g. Sunweb, Eliza was here & Gogo). The project was initiated by the front-end developers of the company in collaboration with the design team. At the time, the company had been working on a re-platforming for 3 years and it was not time to move different brands into the new CMS. To make the transfer of these brands as easy as possible and while maintaining the different brand identities of all the brands, we decided to build a design system.
We formed a team of Front-end developers and designers, organised many meetings to discuss naming conventions, and work together on the implementation.
Within the design system project, the goal was to integrate 6 different brands. The design system team started by defining the foundations (e.g. colours, font-sizes & font-families), materials (e.g. body, headings, icons) and colour schemes (combination of colours + text + links) per brand.
After finishing that, we focused on the two main brands that would migrate first: Sunweb & Eliza was here. For those brands, we worked on the core components: e.g. buttons, dropdowns, cards & modals, to assure the basics were covered. We continued by following a page driven approach: delivering full pages within the design system.
The amazing thing about the design system is that you build a component (e.g. a dropdown) for one brand, and the system automatically copies that element to the other brands and applies the foundations, materials and colour schemes of that specific brand. This means that for the remaining 4 brands, we will have all the components ready once we finish the full page driven strategy and we will only need to tweak the design to make the brand stand out amongst out other brands. Making it possible to build a lot of different websites with relatively little effort.
The design system can be visited on:
designsystem.sundiogroup.com
