Case study · 01 · 3 years, then 1 on and off

Apple

Internal systems for Apple, from company-wide intranet applications to manager-level tools, built on a Drupal design system I designed on top of Apple’s own standards.

Role: Sole designer, via Orium
Timeline: 3 years, then 1 on and off
Team: A couple of Apple’s developers
Disciplines: Design systems · Internal tools · Drupal · Client relations

Confidential · NDA

The work itself is under NDA. What follows is about the approach and the reasoning, so no confidential material is shown here.

Design systems
Internal tools
Drupal
Client relations

Overview

Over five years at Orium, I spent three straight years working with Apple and about another year on and off after that. I was the sole designer on their internal systems, which ranged from intranet applications used across the whole company to applications built for managers. Underneath all of it sat a Drupal design system that I built on top of Apple’s standards design system.

Scope

Internal systems, from the whole company down to a manager’s desk.

The brief was to support Apple’s internal needs. That covered a wide range of audiences, from tools everyone at the company relied on to applications for a much smaller group of managers.

Company-wide intranet applicationsApplications used across the company, designed for an audience as broad as Apple itself.
Manager-level applicationsTools for managers, designed closely with senior managers and around sensitive data.
A Drupal design systemThe shared foundation every one of those applications was built from, layered on Apple’s own standards.

System

A Drupal design system, layered on Apple’s standards.

Apple already had a standards design system. My job was to build the layer between it and the applications, a Drupal design system that carried those standards into the components the internal applications were built from.

ApplicationsIntranet and manager-level applicationsThe tools people across Apple actually used day to day.
My layerThe Drupal design systemApple’s standards, carried into Drupal as the shared parts every application was built from.
FoundationApple’s standards design systemThe base everything above it inherits from.

Role

One designer, embedded in Apple’s team.

I was the only designer on the work. I joined Apple’s own team and worked alongside a couple of their developers, and I managed the client relationship directly, which put me in the room with teams across the company and with senior managers.

01Sole designerI owned the design across every project, from the applications down to the system under them.
02Inside their teamI worked day to day with a couple of developers on Apple’s side.
03Client relationsI managed the relationship directly, with teams across the company and senior managers.

Outcome

Brought back onto future projects.

I’m proud of everything I helped produce for Apple and of the impact it had across the company. The feedback and reviews from the teams I worked with were consistently strong, and that experience is why I kept being brought back onto new projects.

None of the screens or numbers can leave the building, so this page is the approach rather than the artifacts. The discipline it took, designing a system that holds up across a company that size, is the same one behind the rest of the work on this site.

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