Centralise Corporate Design Templates: open- | inner-source

[juliafeld]

Dear all

During my daily work I encountered the issue of “making something nice” in terms of integrating the corporate design to the output. So far this concerned in particular the following use cases (incomplete list):

• Publishing a streamlit / dash app
• Writing a request (external) with R Markdown, output as (paged) HTML and PDF
• Writing a report in Latex (instead of Word, also read by internal and external)*

In general every time a document is public, distributed external or internal for “more official uses” one tries to integrate the corporate design (for external there is even an obligation as far as I know).
Some help for the first two can be found in the DataLab repositories, see “Baloise_Corporate_Design_Tools” and “BaloiseRmarkdown” (there may be other). I contacted Hannah Lantermann (from the DataLab) to ask her if it is possible to also upload the Latex stylings to the repository but since I am not part of the DataLab this seems not possible. Instead she suggested to upload it somewhere here (which can be discussed). In general Hannah proposed (and I think this is a great idea) to centralise the corporate design templates at one place such that it can easily be found in the Intranet (here Vorlagen-Corporate-Design or here Marke-Corporate-Design). I guess this would save a lot of time for people running into similar issues.

I am not sure what the best solution would be and hope you are up for a discussion.
Let me know what your thoughts and suggestions are 😊.

*Some insights in “why we decided to use Latex” and an output example at the end:
In general the report we wrote is a report one could easily write in Word instead, but there are some properties of Latex that we wanted to take advantage of:

1. We use a git-repo to track our changes. Since Latex is like code one can easily see which changes were made and also who made them.
2. The numbers we publish in these reports should in general not be changed “by accident”. There is a four-eyes-principle in place, once this has been performed we can now easily track if the relevant part is still the same.
3. The report is quite similar each year, this allows easy comparison of what has changed since the last report/year.
4. Last: we are mathematicians and are used to Latex as a Tool and hence also comfortable using it

[MarkusTiede]

Thanks @juliafeld for the detailed description - a couple of thoughts regarding this proposal

• I completely agree that centralizing and making it easy to use CI templates would make sense
• I'd tend to drive this as an inner-source instead of an open-source project as this is - different from the Design System primarily targeting for inner Baloise Group usage: but if we'd keep it decoupled from the primarily design elements I'm also fine with open-sourcing.
• I think we'd need to discuss (and maybe the current rebranding phase is a good point in time) with the teams that drive our "cooperate identity & design" whether they'd be interested in something like this and whether they also might have resources to support the idea
• from a technical point of view I'd tend voting for basing this on asciidoc instead of (maybe a bit outdated and not that portable and with less good tool support) an LaTeX based approach (my guesstimation would be that markdown would be too lightweight / few possibilities for these documents)

Is the idea to have a template / guide / education material for

• static & printable documents
• or for interactive / dynamic app / website / etc. based solutions

[MarkusTiede]

Current ideas for next steps

• focus on static content and documents e.g. latex, pdf, asciidoc : non-interactive
• @MarkusTiede contacts @hirsch88 for best contact partner regarding e.g. design-system and technical single-sourcing for non word-based templates ✅
• decide on technical format : LaTeX to AsciiDoc
  • SWOT
  • template similar to e.g. https://github.com/arc42/arc42-template

[MarkusTiede]

Recommendation contact @Gagne87 for further input - @hirsch88 : sound's like a (really) good idea; activities with single sourcing of basic design information is currently running and fits really well to the approach of a central design-system.

[MarkusTiede]

Maybe worth getting @mk-it-easy opinion as CoP UX - maybe also doing a survey: what is already present & required?

Maybe also getting in contact with @MicBag with his perspective on (outgoing public) documents & frameworks in general.

[Gagne87]

@MarkusTiede definetely up for discussion, thanks. Design Tokens are in my head for quite a while now. Also just had a chat with @hirsch88 and he is working on a technical solution at the moment. Would you mind setting up a quick meeting for that? I would like to understand what exactly is the scope on the document side.