How to Build a Design System

What Defines a Design System?

A design system is more than just the basic setup of CI principles and more than a collection of UI components. It's a framework that documents all visual principles, component libraries, behavioral rules, methodologies, and code used across a brand. A good design system serves as a central source of truth for all team members, ensuring a consistent brand and user experience across all touchpoints.

The Benefits

If a system isn’t in place or is poorly set up, a company is faced with two major challenges. The first is directed toward internal processes, such as escalating onboarding, slow workflows, difficulties in decision-making, and dependencies on key people. The second challenge affects the end consumer's perception of the product or company.

Companies without a design system often face common issues like inconsistencies, sometimes even in basic elements like colors and fonts across products. These inconsistencies and design changes can lead to confusion, making it difficult for customers to navigate your brand due to varying experiences. In the long run, this can leave users feeling confused and perceive your brand as unprofessional, ultimately reducing the trustworthiness of the product or company. If this sounds familiar to you, it might be time to implement a design system.

Having a design system has always been important — this isn’t something new. It takes over the task of managing design at scale by reducing redundancy and creating a common language and visual consistency across different sites and channels. Take Apple as an example; they’ve had strong, consistent branding from the start, which is a big part of their success. This was achieved through a clear set of rules that can be felt at every point and in every pixel of their appearance. A well-aligned brand helps communicate its message clearly to customers and users.

And yes, a proper, well-thought-through design system may take some time to set up, but once it's in place, the key benefits are clear. Here’s what you can expect:

1. Having a single source of truth for branding: It serves as a centralized hub for all branding elements — colors, fonts, components, and more. This ensures consistency across every platform. When everyone works from the same set of guidelines, the brand message remains unified, which leads to a solid, reliable brand presence.
2. Reducing repetitive tasks: Reusable and well-documented components mean designers and developers spend less time on repetitive work, reducing costs and allowing the team to focus on improving the UX.
3. Improved collaboration across teams and minimizing misunderstandings: An “easy to understand” design system ensures that everyone speaks the same visual language, leaving less room for misunderstandings, which reduces errors and ensures smoother workflows. It clearly defines how each component should be used, reducing the likelihood of inconsistencies or misapplication.
4. Streamlining onboarding processes: With a design system in place, onboarding new hires or external partners becomes much simpler. Documentation replaces excessively long onboarding calls, saving time for both parties.
5. Paving the way for rebranding or scaling and growth: Whether your company is rebranding, adding new features, or even introducing new products, having a design system enables you to scale with ease. Teams can pull from pre-existing components and guidelines.
6. Maintaining consistency across platforms: Ideally, a design system acts like an Ikea manual — it tells users exactly how to apply design principles, what to do, and what not to do. This ensures brand and product consistency, but only if it’s well-structured. Consistency also extends to the development side — by integrating certain tools, development teams can ensure that the same components are reused across different products or platforms, preventing design divergence as you scale.

Let’s face it; In today’s digital world, design systems have become even more essential. As companies grow larger and more complex, a solid design system makes it easier to manage the visual storytelling of your brand. When set up correctly, it simplifies the process of scaling, integrating tools like AI, and automating workflows. It essentially becomes the foundation for everything your company does, making it a crucial investment for long-term success.

Core Features of an Effective Design System

The key elements that every design system should include can be grouped into several categories, from foundational elements to more complex patterns. A design system is a living document that evolves with your organization. However, there are some key elements that design systems should include.

The Foundation

This may be common knowledge, but for the sake of clarity and because it’s important to begin with strong core building blocks that define a product’s visual and interactive identity, here’s a breakdown: 

1. Color palette: The set of brand colors complemented by functional tones that are necessary in digital applications to ensure proper user guidance. With colors, things like accessibility and concrete use of colors, e.g. active color, become important.
2. Typography: Accessibility plays a role when choosing fonts, too. Factors like running length and legibility are essential, making overly ornate fonts unsuitable. Additionally, ease of implementation is important, which is why fonts from sources like Google Fonts are commonly used.
3. Spacing and layout: Spacing guidelines, grid systems, and breakpoints are essential for a seamless responsive design. Here, it comes down to finding the sweet spot between maximum flexibility and simple, consistent application.
4. Iconography: Don't underestimate a good icon set. Not only to represent the brand visually, but to enable perfect user guidance as well.
5. Imagery and illustration: The guidelines for using visual material (photos, illustrations) have a major influence on how the brand is perceived. However, technical aspects, such as data size, which can significantly impact platform performance, should not be overlooked either.

As I’ve already mentioned in the first part, all points mentioned above should be checked and documented for accessibility aspects as well. Accessibility standards should be integrated into every aspect of the design system to ensure inclusivity and usability. Here, I want to refer to the WCAG Accessibility Guidelines, which contain topics like color contrast, text resizing, keyboard navigation, etc. 

The foundation, which represents the brand guidelines should, of course, also include the tone of voice, logo appliance, and animation and motion guidelines.

UI Components

Now, this is a set of reusable, functional components that form the interactive elements of the UI, all while adhering to the visual principles. 

The base consists of small components, like buttons, input fields, list elements, and chips — elements found in every digital product, making them indispensable. Next, there are larger components, such as content cards, accordions, and tables, which often already contain smaller components. This is where the benefits of consistency for scalability first become evident. And finally, there are even larger components that can form whole sections and are often a constellation of multiple components.

Once you create the components, they should be precisely documented. What do the different states look like? Ideally, the states should also be aligned across components in order to create a recognition value for the user. What’s the behavior and usage of the component? Along with descriptions, include the do's and don'ts — especially regarding accessibility — and integrate Figma or Storybook examples to make the design more concrete and practical.

How to Get Started with Your Design System

Implementing a design system is a structured process that requires careful planning, collaboration, and continuous iteration. A design system is never truly finished; as your company evolves, so should your design system. Instead of trying to implement the entire system all at once, take a step-by-step approach.

Scope and Necessity:

1. Define MVP and usage goals: The size and level of detail for your design system highly depends on the size of your company and product(s). Are you doing a relaunch, adding new features, or building a completely new product? With the requirements of the project come the requirements for the design system. Another important consideration is to think about who will use the design system and for what purposes — whether it’s designers, developers, marketers, or external teams — and ensuring the system addresses their needs.
2. Secure stakeholder buy-in: Involve leadership early on. Present the long-term benefits of a design system to key decision-makers to secure budget and support.‍
3. Cross-functional collaboration: Ensure buy-in from various teams since they’ll play a role in building and maintaining the system.

The Setup:

1. Conduct a design inventory: Review all existing brand elements, UI components, design patterns and code of all digital products. Identify inconsistencies and gaps in your current design and development processes, document everything, and gather all current design files, style guides, component libraries, and all related documentation in one place for analysis.
2. Document the brand guidelines: Define the core principles and create clear guidelines for your brand’s visual identity, including color schemes, typography, iconography, and spacing. These foundational elements will form the backbone of your design system. Also, make sure to set the tone and voice, and ensure your guidelines reflect the brand’s tone and personality. 
3. Build the component library: Start with core UI components. Create reusable components like buttons, input fields, navigation elements, and modals, but make sure these components are flexible enough to be used across different platforms and devices. They should be scalable and adaptable as your product grows or new features are added. Based on this, you can add further components for each new product and feature.
4. Provide detailed guidelines: For each component, document the states, usage and visual features, and any technical details developers need. Include code snippets, best practices, and visual examples. Make the system accessible. Ensure the documentation is easy to access and understand for all stakeholders.
5. Integrate tools: If possible, link to design and developer tools. Also, organize components in design files to make them easy to find and use. 
6. Start small: Launch the design system in phases, starting with a core set of components or one product. Test its effectiveness, gather feedback, and make necessary adjustments.
7. Implement gradually: Gradually expand the system across all teams and products, ensuring smooth integration and minimal disruption.
8. Promote adoption: Educate teams by holding training sessions and workshops to teach them how to use the design system. Always make sure to provide clear examples and use cases.
9. Encourage collaboration: Foster a culture of collaboration between design, product, and development teams to ensure everyone uses the design system effectively.
10. Continuous maintenance and updates: Keep it up to date. As the company evolves, update the design system to reflect new brand elements, products or technologies. Treat it as a living document that grows and evolves over time. Monitor usage and feedback. Regularly gather feedback from users of the design system to identify issues, areas for improvement, or new components to add.
11. Assign ownership: Designate someone or a small team to manage and maintain the system, ensuring it remains relevant and consistent as the company scales.

All in all, I can recommend finding a good balance between very precise but also very simplified documentation, thus creating no room for discrepancies. 

A Strategic Investment in Your Company’s Future

A well-implemented design system drives innovation, improves user experiences, and supports the company’s growth. By reducing repetitive tasks, streamlining onboarding, and maintaining consistency, you’re making a strategic investment in the long-term success of a digital product.

If you’re ready to take the first step towards building or refining your design system — or you just want to discuss a different opinion with me on the topic, feel free to reach out.