All systems go.
When Subito, one of Italy’s top 10 online destinations, was in a rush to migrate and rebuild their design system in Figma, they called Belka.
It’s classified
Introducing Subito
In Italy, Subito is kind of a big deal. With more than 11m active monthly users, it’s the country’s biggest classifieds service as well as one of the most popular online destinations.
When Covid hit, Subito’s designers were on a deadline to release a brand new product. As they scrambled to adapt to working from home, they realized they needed to make some big changes.
Belka’s brief: Migrate and rebuild Subito’s entire design system in Figma, and help the team transition without losing days of work.
The great migration
From Sketch to Figma
In March 2020, Subito’s design team was facing a serious problem. For years, they had been using Sketch as a design environment and repository for their design system, mostly without problems.
But then disaster hit. Literally.
Forced by the global pandemic to work from home, the team found that Sketch, a non-cloud platform, was creating serious bottlenecks, just as when they were about to launch an important new product.
They had to figure out a solution, and they had to do it quickly.
Under the hood
A design system in action
One component to control them all
With Figma’s master component/instance structure, Subito’s designers can define all the attributes of a UI element in the design system. Any changes that they make to a master component will automatically cascade down to all instances of that component, throughout the whole design.
Sticker sheet mania
The sticker sheet is an indispensable part of Subito’s design system setup. A separate file with a well organized overview of all the components of the system, the sticker sheet a great way to review and work with component libraries without the fear of breaking something, or spending minutes looking for the right component.
A quick transition
Workshop and training
Belka’s crack team of experts came up with a workshop to introduce Subito’s team to both Figma as a tool, and to use it to work with their shiny new design system.
Having a single source of truth for all our products has been game changing.
The design system Belka created for us helped us be better at our jobs. We were incredibly impressed.
