About Trello’s Nachos Design System

Nachos was Trello's first Design System. Nachos was a comprehensive guide and resource library containing everything a designer at Trello needed including core principles, visual design, interface components, branding, and resources. The design team’s three main motivations for a design system were consistency, alignment, and efficiency.

As a team, we not only developed and shipped a comprehensive design system, we simultaneously updated design elements on Trello. This was such an amazing accomplishment because while we were making design decisions that would guide our design language for years to come, we also tested, validated, and shipped our design decisions. Marc Jenkinson wrote a fantastic article on the Trello Blog that perfectly tells the story of Nachos, and I strongly suggest that you read it to learn more about our process: https://blog.trello.com/introducing-nachos-a-tasty-new-design-system-for-trello

One of the components for Nachos that I took the lead on was Typography. It was a project that lasted a few months, and it was a great opportunity to take a deep dive into the topic. I wrote an article on our research and findings for the Trello blog; it’s a fascinating read: https://blog.trello.com/the-typography-behind-trello