Similarly to Laureate Education, UNSW too owns multiple digital websites. Whereas the team at Laureate looked after less than a dozen, the DEX (Department of External Relations) web team at UNSW looked after thousands.
I started in 2018, as senior UX designer and immediately commenced building a Design System that could house their Global Experience Language or GEL. They actually didn’t quite have a GEL yet, so I started building this too. I named the framework that encapsulated it al Gelato.
At the same time, the dev team commenced developing their own version of a multisite for all new websites that using this would automatically have the latest components across all deployments. They used the latest version of Drupal at the time, Drupal 8, and they named it the Global Experience Framework or GEF.
Then two big advancements came knocking at the door. 1. All sites would one day move to a new platform called Adobe Experience Manager which they named the Digital Marketing Platform (DMP) and 2. the UNSW brand would get a complete refresh.
To incorporate these big changes, I started treating the entire GEL inside the Gelato design system framework as their own entities. UNSW1.0 became the entire GEL for Drupal 8/GEF, UNSW2.0 became the GEL for Drupal 8/GEF websites with minor updates to reflect the brand refresh and UNSW3.0 became the re-imagined GEL for Adobe Experience Manager 100% on brand. Within the Gelato design system framework I called these entities gusti, which means flavour in Italian.
