Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Chandan Mishra

Did I mention getting featured on Product Hunt and a product validation as well?

Check on Dribbble

The Origin

What is a design language?

Nate Baldwin explains it very nicely in his article What is Design Language… Really?

The term “Design Language” is used to describe the overall visual design of a digital product. — Nate, in his article.

A couple of weeks ago, while helping one of our enterprise clients, here at Coditas, create and maintain a design language (AKA Design System), I was curious on how other big enterprise companies are maintaining their design languages? I was aware of a few, like IBM’s Living Language, Google’s Material, Salesforce Lightning Design System, but what else?

I am a simple human being, so I googled😊. And googled😐. And googled😫. And then it clicked. Why not create a website where I can put the design languages I have found through hours of hunting, so that other designers won’t have to waste time🤔?

Voila! The idea of design-languages.com — A place to Discover The Best Design Languages — was born.

Day 1 — Coming up with the Initial Design

Since it was more of a side product idea, I skipped a lot of steps and just went straight to the whiteboard, well, in this case, a pen and a paper and I sketched out the simplest way I could design it.

So the idea was straight forward, we’ll have a website where we will feature all the design languages I had found via my google search. You click any of the design language item you see on the website, and we’ll take you directly to the respective page.

After I could pour my initial idea on paper, I went straight ahead and designed it. It was going to be a single page website.

Check on Dribbble

I also thought, why not make it community driven by letting the people visiting the website submit a design language via a simple Submit action? This would save me a lot of time as well. So I added a provision for the same:

Check on Dribbble

I went ahead and booked the domain. And we were all Set! It was time to bring this idea to life!

Day 2 — Bringing it to Life

So far so good. But this could not live in form of a static png images and a prototype, right?
Enter Varun Srinivas. The dude who helped me make this possible. The dude who coded the backend and the frontend in no time!

We used google firebase to host our website. And we were live!

https://design-languages.com/

Getting featured on ProductHunt!

After we pushed the website live and shared it with a few of the people in our network, we immediately started getting good feedback and a lot of suggestions. A passive launch done right. There were a couple of issues, like we didn’t have a search capability🙈. We identified such issues and fixed them no time.

And then, product hunt picked us up. Many thanks to Graeme Fulton.
Check Design Languages on Product Hunt.

And People Have Started Loving us Already

Product Pipeline:

As you would have noticed that we do not have a way to allow our users vote a design language.

The goal is to help designers discover the best design languages available on the internet so that it can help other designers save time.

Along with a voting feature, we also thought it’ll be great if we could add a section for front-end development frameworks, to help our brothers in the development community. So, we are going to come up with a section in the website to feature the best and most popular front-end frameworks out there.

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From an Idea to a Product Launch in 2 days was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From an Idea to a Product Launch in 2 days

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