What is a Design System?
In the world of UX & UI design, a design system is a powerful tool that ensures consistency, efficiency, and scalability in your product.
In short, it’s a comprehensive library of reusable design components, guided by clear rules and standards, that is used to create new features and flows. It's a single source of truth, ensuring that your brand's visual identity and user experience remain consistent across all platforms and devices. Without one, your product could end up looking like a hot mess over time!
Why invest in a design system?
Although creating a design system may feel like overkill in the early days, the benefits of starting from day one will save you a huge amount of time, frustration and money down the line.
- Consistency: A design system puts your product’s design on rails, creating a unified user experience across all digital touchpoints. The modular approach allows multiple teams to work independently on different parts of the product while maintaining a consistent design language.
- Efficiency: Designers and developers save precious, expensive time by reusing components rather than constantly reinventing the wheel, freeing them up for more creative and strategic work. It also enables global updates when strategic design decisions result in changes throughout the product.
- Scalability: As your product evolves, your design system grows alongside it, creating a flywheel effect as it accommodates more and more features and functionality over time.
- Collaboration: A design system bridges the gap between design and development, ensuring a cohesive product and reducing the number of design bugs that may creep into the build.
- Continuity: When designers and developers on a product inevitably change, a well-documented design system is an effective onboarding tool that gets new team members up to speed quickly.
What goes into a design system?
A design system will start simply based on the initial features and functionality of your product. But over time, it will become a comprehensive guide that includes (but is definitely not limited to):
- Styles: Fonts, colours, spacing, typography rules, etc.
- Components: Buttons, fields, menus, navigation patterns, dropdowns, etc.
- Sections and page templates: Layouts, grids, hierarchy, etc.
- Documentation: Clear guidelines, code snippets, and usage examples.
The beauty of a design system lies in its hierarchical nature. Changes made at lower levels cascade through the system, ensuring consistency across all components.
Top Tips from our Studio on creating a successful design system:
- “Agree on terminology.” - Lance
One of your design system’s key goals is to keep design and development aligned, so make sure everyone is speaking the same language with consistent naming conventions. - “Keep it simple, clean and organised.” - Saskia
A design system can become a monster if there are too many options and variants. Be clear and decisive, keep it up to date as your product evolves and remove old components that are no longer in use. - “Limit who has permission to make changes.” - Hendri
If you have multiple designers working on a product, be careful of allowing your design system to be too organic. A change should come with solid rationale, an understanding of the change implications and team consensus.
Starting your design system is an investment in the future of your product. It's a commitment to creating a consistent experience that will benefit your brand, your team, your pocket and your users in the long-run.
Question about your design system?
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Getting into this? Here are some good resources.
Book
Atomic Design, Brad Frost
Comprehensive Design System Examples
Material Design, Google
Base, Uber (Product Ecosystem)
Polaris, Shopify
Atlassian
Note: These are incredibly extensive, built up over years. Start small and you’ll get here!
