Zeroheight

Zeroheight started as a tool for keeping design files in sync. Then Sketch began building much of that functionality directly into its product.

2017

I’d previously worked on design standards across an organisation of around 400 people. The difficult part wasn’t creating another library of components. It was helping people understand what existed, when to use it, and how it should behave.

That knowledge rarely lived in one place. It was spread across design files, code, documents and conversations—and quickly became unreliable as the system changed.

This became the opportunity for Zeroheight: a shared layer of documentation around the design system, rather than another tool trying to replace the design software itself.

The product needed to work for people creating the system and for the much larger group trying to use it.

Maintainers needed flexible tools for organising guidance, examples and reusable assets. Everyone else needed a clear, searchable source of truth that didn’t require them to navigate the underlying design files.

I shaped the product around a simple publishing model: bring the system’s assets together, add the context needed to use them well, and make the result accessible across the organisation.

Real design systems are rarely clean. Libraries overlap, naming is inconsistent, ownership is distributed, and documentation is always catching up with the work.

Zeroheight couldn’t depend on teams fixing all of that before they could begin. The product needed to make incomplete systems useful, while giving maintainers a path towards something more coherent.

That influenced how content was structured, how assets were organised, and how teams could gradually build documentation around what they already had.

I designed both sides of the product: the environment used to create documentation and the published experience used across the organisation.

The authoring side needed enough structure to keep documentation coherent without becoming rigid. The published side needed to make complex systems feel straightforward, even for people who weren’t designers.

The initial product established a model that has proved remarkably durable. Much of its underlying structure can still be seen in Zeroheight nearly nine years later.

The product has since grown into a design-system platform used by 20 of the Fortune 100.