Pharos Design System

The Pharos design system is an open-sourced federated team of designers and engineers at ITHAKA who contribute and help maintain functionality and documentation. Pharos is used in ITHAKA’s core product, JSTOR, and helps extend the JSTOR brand.

Sample images below demonstrate pieces of the design system that I contributed or collaborated on. 🙏 🙏 🙏

Note: Other team members included architects, product designers, accessibility lead, and software engineers.

Our Problem Space:

Maintaining a design system when there isn’t a dedicated team requires passion and skill. This work went on top of or helped inform product team work. Our product teams worked using agile methods in 2-week sprints. This men’t that either Pharos work needed to some how be incorporated into team sprint work or accounted for outside of board work.

Key Details:

• Pharos is an open-sourced design system that requires public-facing documentation

• Federated structure, select employees work to maintain the integrity of the system

• Design System, Figma, Components, Variables, Tokens, Storybook, Github, A11y

High Impact Initiatives Completed:

• Contributed several Figma components and tokens to a shared Figma library

• Developed new process and helped refine existing process

• Onboarded new team members to the design system and Figma

• From concept to execution of new component that was deployed to all JSTOR product teams