Introduction
The Foundation of Triton
Triton at its core is the design system of Kongsberg Digital, a collection of pre-built and reusable assets, components, designs, and guidelines combined into one universe. Triton enables product teams to create intuitive, and beautiful experiences for KDI’s digital products, and speeds up development through design and code reuse and sharing. Triton foundation elements are building blocks: iconography, typography, spacing, layout, and structure.
The Triton Design System enables consistency of function, look, and feel across different products in the organization. It is a shared document where the designers of Kongsberg can collaborate to solve common design challenges. This allows designers to focus on solving project-specific design problems, instead of focusing on general problems that have already been solved. And similarly developers can use Triton to collaborate, through contributions, where components from various projects can become part of the Triton Universe, and then be reused by other projects. The goal of Triton is to facilitate collaboration and unity in Kongsberg.
Why do we need design systems?
Software is built by teams of people which sometimes spann across many different customs, cultures, times, and locations. The challenge to create coherent experiences multiplies as more creators are contributing. And over time, even in the smallest, most consistent teams, different people will contribute new solutions and individual styles, causing the end product's aesthetics and function to diverge.
A design system gives us a shared understanding of our visual style, enabling us to achieve consistency at scale. Instead of having 100 products put together separately with completely unique parts, a design system allows us to build a product catalog of 100 unique products, that have a functional and visual throughline. Another benefit of using a design system is collaboration. Creators from various projects can contribute together in a shared document, and enable others to reap the benefits of their labor.
In addition, using a design system generally speeds up development, since product engineers can focus on writing the feature logic, insead of implementing basic aesthetics. Also, designers and product owners can focus on the actual concepts and experiences of a design, rather than padding, colors, and type choices.