During their internship, the student worked with a team of ~40 multi-talented designers and collaborated closely with stakeholders and teams of designers based in California (United States), South Korea and India in an agile environment and collected feedback from Cisco's experts to continuously improve the User Experience. The student's business domain was CX Cloud, a one-stop destination and a fairly new initiative by Cisco. It aims to give expert guidance and best practices for cloud strategy, security and app deployment to access Cisco and partners' expertise, best practices, and insights. The student conducted a design audit by looking at the existing screens, reviewing for inconsistencies, making notes of improvement areas and ultimately, creating an inventory of the product's icons and illustrations and their current usage. The student's goal was to add to the visual & functional layers of the product while documenting the process & their learnings throughout the journey. The intent was to create an easily scalable, reusable & adaptable icon & illustration system to be used seamlessly by different stakeholders, including the product, engineering and marketing teams. The project involved exploration, experimentation and validation of various processes of building a design system. This project took the student through the overlap of art and design as they had hoped to do for the last 3.5 years. In that process, it helped them understand and appreciate the design process, deeply immersed in context and semiotics–instilling every atom of the design solution with intent and meaning. Nothing in the CX Cloud library's design development happened entirely linearly, and in the real-world setting, the design process is quite non-linear. The skill and patience that the student gained while working with a cross-functional and highly collaborative team have given the student the confidence to take up projects in the future and keep learning.
Design System, Icon design, Iconography, Illustration system, Visual Design
