zeroheight’s Year in Review

While 2021 has been a bit of a ‘hold my beer’ year, there have been some silver linings appearing around the edges of another year largely defined by a global pandemic. We’ve seen the return of some kind of sensible politics in some major parts of the world, families and friends have been reunited as the world tentatively opened up, Adele released a new album that is actually quite good, and Keeping up with the Kardashians is finally off my screen.

At zeroheight, we’ve had a pretty great year, in that we’ve continued to help design teams grow and work better together, and internally we’ve hit some pretty big milestones, which is exciting! As a celebration, we thought we’d trawl through the data and highlight some of our favourite pieces…

Twenty. Five. Thousand. Styleguides. That’s almost 100 styleguides being created every working day around the world. Color us impressed! But let’s break it down further…

Within the 25k styleguides, y’all created 1.1m pages of content. That’s almost 1000 copies of War & Peace, 960 copies of the entire Lord of the Rings series or almost 6000 copies of Atomic Design. However, while that averages at about 40 pages per styleguide, the reality is that some of you created a lot more than that, with one company creating almost 800 pages this year in their styleguide, with the average sitting at around 70 pages.

In terms of what you actually added to your styleguide, it’s no surprise that text took top spot, closely followed by design and image uploads. How else are you going to describe how folks should use the system? What I’m hoping for 2022 is that we see code blocks closing the gap and getting closer to parity with images as we see more and more teams including engineering as first-class citizens in their documentation.

We were pleased to see that Saturdays and Sundays are by far the lowest trafficked days of the week (work-life balance is very important to us), but it did tickle me slightly that we also see considerable dropoffs in activity on Mondays and Fridays. I thought I was the only one who was surreptitiously trying to make the weekend last for four days…

This was one of the most surprising things to come out of the data, in my opinion. Within our bubble, it’s felt like Figma’s dominance has really taken hold, but in reality, there are still a lot of people using Sketch…

One of the exciting things to see is zeroheight (and design systems in general) starting to properly spread across the world. It makes sense that the leading markets are still the UK and the US, but it’s pretty awesome to see large swathes of South America, Europe, and Asia getting in on the action. I’m also really excited to see African countries start appearing on the list, with the new design hotspot Nigeria appearing for the first time!

Finally, zeroheight itself has been growing as well! Our small team is growing week by week, with 11 folks growing to 41 by the beginning of December (and 10 more to come by the end of January and ~15 open roles). As part of this, we also opened our US office in Oakland, California, which keeps expanding (and will shortly feature our CEO, Jerome, as a permanent resident). Finally, half way through the year saw a big milestone in zeroheight’s story, when we raised a Series A. A big thank you to our investors for believing in our mission and helping us grow DesignOps and Design Systems as a concept globally.

That brings us to the end of our Year in Review. Finally a big thank you to you, whether you be one of our users, or someone who just dropped by to read the blog. Here’s to a pretty darn good 2021, and to making 2022 even better. See you in the new year!