A Design System is where product knowledge lives
A Design System is your product’s ecosystem. It is organized in strategic ways to communicate messages, encourage certain behaviors and guide you through processes.
A Design System will allow your design and development teams to have a common language in which to speak, allowing them to build seamless cohesive digital products at scale.
Not everybody needs a Design System though, and there’s not one that fits all; different companies have different needs, which require different solutions.
What constitutes a Design System?
Let’s separate the elements so that we can understand each part separately. Design systems could include:
The principles: They are the guiding standards and approaches that reflect the company’s beliefs and values. This aligns teams towards a common goal and helps when there is more than one possible solution. An example could be being accessible and inclusive.
The foundations: They are the primary elements from which you create styles. Some examples are the color palette, typefaces, and accessibility decisions.
Style guides: Define the appearance of elements and the overall voice and tone. They focus on the visual language of the product, and how things should look and feel. Examples include color styles, typography styles, and spacing. Some style guides may also show more conceptual standards like how we speak to users.
Component libraries: Where the properties and variants of all elements live. They focus on how the assets should behave in combination with each other: buttons, boxes, cards, layouts and templates, interaction patterns, modes, code components, device variants.
This accelerates the design and development lifecycle by eliminating tedious debates over aesthetic details, allowing teams to focus on implementation.
Documentation: Explains when, why, and how components should be used. It turns a library of assets into a practical tool that designers, developers, product managers and new team members can understand and apply consistently. Documenting decision rationales eliminates repetitive questioning, allowing teams to move forward without revisiting past discussions.
Maintenance: Having an advocate in each of your teams will help your Design System become alive. You need to distribute the tool across the whole company to test, iterate and keep transforming to adapt.
Start with an audit
Before building a Design System, understand what already exists. Doing an audit of your current system reveals where the product and the teams behind it are experiencing friction. With the audit you’ll be able to review consistency, theming, redundancy, knowledge sharing, speed, and efficiency. An audit sorts and categorizes everything, this way issues and areas of opportunity can be easily spotted. Once you have your audit, we’ll help you decide what kind of Design System could benefit your organization.
The value of a Design System becomes clearer as an organization scales.
. Reusable patterns reduce unnecessary design work
. Alignment between design and code shortens handoffs and iteration cycles
. Documentation improves knowledge sharing and onboarding
. Shared foundations support more consistent experiences across products, platforms and teams
If you’d like to chat about whether your company could benefit from building a Design System, get in touch! We’ll be happy to walk you through the process and help you find the insights you’re looking for.