CognitiveScale: Design System

I worked with the design team at CognitiveScale to design and maintain a design system. The system is used in products and customer solutions, and helps build a brand, increase efficiency, and work with developers.

CognitiveScale components, icons, dark, and light modes

The design system served multiple purposes:

• Representing and defining the CognitiveScale brand within its products. As a design team, we held sessions to define the brand attributes we wanted the system to represent. The emerging, at the time, field of AI needed to demonstrate confidence and trustworthiness. In addition, many of CognitiveScale’s customers were in the financial sector and its user base was largely engineers. Using primarily dark-mode UIs was a natural choice.
• Improving collaboration with engineers. There were engineering teams on 3 continents, so having a common framework for developing the front-ends to our products was a primary goal.
• Increasing the velocity of the design team iterations. We had a lot of projects to do in quick succession. Be establishing a baseline design system, we would be able to design cohesive experiences without reinventing the wheel on a regular basis.

Cortex Console served a sandbox for the development of the design system

I built the design system concurrently with the Cortex Console, our product for managing the infrastructure for ML workloads and AI applications. This gave me a good sandbox for testing out components, layouts, and UX patterns. The design system has now been adopted by the design team and all engineering teams within the company, increasing efficiency, UX cohesion, and heightening the CognitiveScale brand.