Carleton's Raven Design System (RDS) was built to help deliver a unified experience across our many digital properties. By establishing a harmonious, single source of truth for our design decisions and development guidelines, RDS increases the efficiency campus-wide teams are able to build consistent, on-brand, and user-focused websites and applications.

RDS Principles

RDS's design system's principles reflect the university's core values embedded in Carleton's culture.

Be accessible

Carleton has an extensive history of making its campus and education increasingly accessible. This embedded culture extends to our digital experiences. Above meeting government requirements, RDS follows campus-wide views and policies on accessibility that are guided by the principles of dignity, independence, integration and equal opportunity for all. It is imperative that RDS applications are open and accessible to everyone.

Be inclusive

Our system needs to recognize and be designed with empathy for the full spectrum of human diversity and difference. As RDS evolves, we will continue to include and learn from people with a range of perspectives and help foster the development of an inclusive and transformational university culture.

Be ethical

RDS was made with the intent to help Carleton continue to do good. This means our design system and digital properties leveraging RDS need to follow ethical design practices by: supporting human rights (including privacy and security), by respecting human effort (being functional, usable and reliable) while focusing on human/user experience.

A work in progress...

Design Systems are living documents and will never be complete. RDS is continually a work in progress improving and adapting.

But if you are checking out this documentation at this time, you will find these docs very much incomplete.

We are not in production with the system yet. We are working hard to get there. Along the way, this site and the RDS documentation will grow and become more complete.

Stay tuned.

References

https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/aspire/

https://carleton.ca/equity/

https://idrc.ocadu.ca/about-the-idrc/49-resources/online-resources/articles-and-papers/443-whatisinclusivedesign

https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/

Desing Values:

Inclusive design

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/03/ethical-design-practical-getting-started-guide/

https://ind.ie/ethical-design/