A comprehensive design system that standardized UI components across multiple UMD applications, improving accessibility and development efficiency.

Product Design at Scale

The discovery phase spanned six months, involving:

This research revealed significant inconsistencies in design and functionality across university-affiliated digital properties. Given the diverse technical landscape; from PHP-based CMSs and Java applications to static sites hosted in S3 buckets - we needed a platform-agnostic approach that ensured broad adoption.

Inspired by Atomic Design principles, we structured the system with a hierarchical component model that promotes modularity, reuse, and scalability. Leveraging Web Components ensured seamless integration across multiple frontend frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue while enabling backward compatibility with legacy systems.

Discovering the Goals

The project embraced an agile, startup-style culture, with concurrent design and development sprints, iterative user feedback loops, and stakeholder validation milestones. I led the engineering effort, authoring over 2,000 commits, ensuring performance optimizations, and defining a scalable architecture.

The system evolved into multiple core libraries:

By integrating these modular layers, we created an extensible, maintainable, and performance-optimized design system that empowered developers to build custom experiences without sacrificing compliance or consistency.

Engineered Solutions

Understanding that adoption is as important as implementation, we prioritized comprehensive documentation:

By democratizing access to these resources, we ensured the system's usability for developers, designers, and non-technical users.

Open Source Adoption Strategy

The University of Maryland Design System launched with its five core principles fully realized:

The system's success is evident in measurable outcomes:

The University of Maryland's Design System demonstrates how engineering excellence, thoughtful design, and strategic leadership can transform fragmented digital experiences into a cohesive, scalable ecosystem. By combining technical innovation with human-centered design, we delivered a product that serves as the university's digital backbone, ensuring its adaptability and relevance for years.

The Impact

The University of Maryland comprises twelve colleges and schools, six divisions, and over fifty departments, creating a highly decentralized digital ecosystem. This fragmentation resulted in inconsistent branding, varied user experiences, and accessibility compliance challenges. To address these issues, we designed and implemented a scalable, platform-agnostic design system, ensuring brand consistency, accessibility, and ease of adoption across the institution's diverse digital landscape.

As the principal engineer, project lead, and manager of a nine-person team of designers and developers, I guided this initiative from conception to deployment. Over eighteen months, we launched a robust system with over forty Web Components, millions of possible UI combinations, extensive documentation, and a component model, ensuring flexibility and extensibility for campus stakeholders.

Scaling Design for a Decentralized Campus

Josh Magness is a human-centric leader with proven success as an executive, manager, and software engineer

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Product Design at Scale