The term ‘Master’ in Product Design.
Last year I was helping my design systems team migrate all of our existing components from Sketch to Figma. We had a small team of three designers and all were unfamiliar with this new design tool.
To avoid any failures, I knew I needed to immerse myself into this new tool and learn as much as I could from the people that had already achieved this successfully. I read articles, watched videos, attended workshops, etc. I learned the many benefits of creating and using “Master Components”. It would save us time on repetitive work, help keep things consistent and make our system easier to maintain.
My excitement led me to share the knowledge back with my team on these benefits. We implemented the structure behind our components, created processes and workflows and before you know it, we were smooth sailing.
Now anyone that knows me well, knows that I love to learn and observe the creative process of other designers and artists across disciplines and industries outside of my own. I was taking Nas’ class on Hip-Hop Storytelling. He was discussing the music industry in a different and nuanced way. He was encouraging artists to take a more business-minded approach by wanting to own their own masters and expressed his thoughts and feelings on the term ‘Masters’.
“The name ‘Masters’ is even… yikes. You know what I’m saying? There’s a psychological thing there that’s underneath it all.” — Nas
And that’s when it hit me. I was so into the migration project, that I myself had not caught the term I had learned and was using. I had ended up teaching this term to my team to a point where we were all using it loosely. I felt embarrassed and concerned that this would offend or make people uncomfortable.
I started to research if anyone else in the design community had caught this error in naming conventions. What I found was that it was actually a major concern in the developer/engineering world. Even worst, they were using the terms “Master” and “Slave”. The words have been used widely for decades in technical contexts to reference where one process or entity controls another. Just like in Figma, they were using ‘Master’ to describe a primary source.
Some developers didn’t see it as a problem while others felt it was unacceptable. But with the Black Lives Matter movement, Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday and accessibility and inclusive design getting louder in the tech world, more companies have been pressured to rethink.
I was pleased to learn that many companies including Microsoft had taken action by changing their default naming conventions and many more were following suit. So what was I going to change our naming to? I dug deeper into the design community and saw how some teams were naming their components. While many were still using “Master”, I also saw the word “Base” being used a lot. ‘Base’ also comes from the development language to describe an entity that controls others.
With no hesitation, I started to implement the change. At the following project status meeting I owned up to the error and explained that due to the sensitivity of the word, I had gone ahead and made these changes. Luckily I had an understanding team and was met with zero concerns or pushback.
I share this story because as more designers continue to learn new tools and best practices, they could also be picking up some unintentional learnings. It is also important that if you do run into these conventions that we help educate our teams on the sensitivity of these terms. What might have been acceptable a year ago is really no longer acceptable today because we should constantly be learning, growing and evolving.