From Fractal to Framework: Evolving a Design System Across Campus
Modernizing a design system is rarely just a technology project. In higher education, where websites, applications, teams, budgets, and priorities are distributed across an entire institution, it becomes an exercise in collaboration, governance, and occasionally figuring out who actually owns that component everyone has been using for six years.
This session tells the story of UCLA’s ongoing effort to modernize its design system, moving from a Fractal-based system toward a more flexible, token-driven architecture built around tools such as Storybook and Figma. We’ll look beyond the technical migration to explore the process behind it: bringing together teams across departments, evaluating existing components, developing roadmaps, establishing shared standards, and designing a system that can support Drupal alongside React, Angular, and other platforms used across campus.
We’ll also explore how AI has entered the process, from accelerating component migration and prototyping to experimenting with MCP-based access to the design system, and what we’ve learned about where these tools genuinely help versus where humans still have to do the annoyingly human work of reaching consensus.
This session tells the story of UCLA’s ongoing effort to modernize its design system, moving from a Fractal-based system toward a more flexible, token-driven architecture built around tools such as Storybook and Figma. We’ll look beyond the technical migration to explore the process behind it: bringing together teams across departments, evaluating existing components, developing roadmaps, establishing shared standards, and designing a system that can support Drupal alongside React, Angular, and other platforms used across campus.
We’ll also explore how AI has entered the process, from accelerating component migration and prototyping to experimenting with MCP-based access to the design system, and what we’ve learned about where these tools genuinely help versus where humans still have to do the annoyingly human work of reaching consensus.