zeroheight’s Year In Review

The last time we did this, we characterized 2021 as a ‘hold my beer’ year. This time, we’re calling 2022 ‘the year of transitions.’ There were some big ones: the UK has a new monarch for the first time in decades, Marvel is officially in a new phase, and the world’s population is now at 8 billion.

However, one thing has stayed the same: we’re all about design systems. So we spent our year helping some amazing companies build pretty awesome design systems.

To celebrate the year (as has become a tradition), we compiled a few data points and highlights.

Y’all have created almost 1.6 million pages of content in zeroheight. That’s enough pages to print the world’s longest novel, Remembrance of Things Past, precisely 500 times. Luckily, you all had some help. More than 23,000 of you edited styleguides this year. That’s enough people to form a country larger than Palau, Tuvalu, and Nauru.

With so many of you creating so many pages, there were a lot of blocks. 1,055,860 blocks, to be exact. The most popular blocks were design uploads, followed by images, headings, and dividers. Something else that cracked the top ten this year was code blocks. We’d hoped engineering content would be more prominent in design systems after checking out the data from last year, and we’re getting there.

On that note, design tokens are gaining ground which is a massive win for making design systems relevant to both designers and developers. We had 14,486 design tokens created in zeroheight. And for teams using our Pro and Enterprise plans, more than 80% had at least one design token documented. We believe design tokens are the DNA of a company. So it was cool to see a few folks documenting them.

Documenting something as crucial to an organization as a design token requires lots of alignment. So it makes sense that you all wrote 59,122 comments. To add icing to the communication cake, ya’ll also added 24,595 annotations to design uploads. Considering we only released this feature in October, that’s bananas! Good on you all for adding extra context for styleguide viewers!

Speaking of those viewers, you all used something else to help them understand context. Status tags! And you all used them 45,936 times to let folks know when something was ready to go, in progress, or deprecated.

The way zeroheight is used is impressive, and so are all of you. There are design system nerds spread across 41 countries, four more than last year. A big welcome to the folks in Costa Rica, Romania, Greece, and Saudi Arabia! A worldwide product requires a worldwide team.

In company news, zeroheight grew to 81 people spread across five different countries. We also grew to four product squads that combined for 1,404 merge requests. Those requests turned into pretty nifty updates to zeroheight (if we do say so ourselves)!

With so much to celebrate around here, we all got together in Istanbul this October for our first annual offsite. With this year serving as our first fully remote year, it was extra special to see each other IRL. We took advantage of all opportunities to interact virtually, too. Over the year, we checked in with each other in 730 Donut chats, hosted many quizzes and came together once a month for team meals.

That’s it for this year! Looking back, we can’t help but be grateful to our users and the broader community. It’s been a great year, and we know next year will also be one to celebrate. See you all there!