Make the Most of an Effective Design System
What is a Design System?
A design system is a set of standards and tools that help keep the look and feel of brand items (such as physical products, websites, marketing ads, mobile apps) consistent and easy to deliver. A good design system is both the blueprint and the building blocks—meaning that it provides the strategy and plan as well as actual tools and pre-built elements to incorporate during design and development processes.
Elements of a Design System
Design systems are usually made up of common elements. The following are a sample of what they should include:
Written guides and documentation: e.g., technical specs, process documentation, best practices, guidelines, and core principles
Pattern and component libraries: collections of pre-made, reusable UI elements such as buttons, fonts, typography, or components like pop-ups, cards, accordions
Code snippets: Blocks of reusable code for common product elements that developers can grab easily for their projects
Interaction patterns: Repeatable documented solutions for common interactions between users and products
Icon library: Well-organized, updatable library of icons
Why Use a Design System?
While design systems take some time and effort to set up, they’re well worth the investment. We think there are little to no drawbacks. Here are some of the big benefits they provide:
Improving efficiency and accelerating design and development lifecycles
For most proponents, efficiency is one of the biggest benefits of a good design system. They just save so much time. You can use basic elements over and over without reinventing the wheel. That means that your teams can focus on more-complex problems or more creative options.
Reducing redundancy
This is a subset of our first point, but it’s worth calling out. Without a design system, different teams working on different projects will likely create the same design items each time. This happens frequently (sometimes even with design systems). Good design systems that have been integrated throughout an organization will go a long way to help ensure each design element is created only once. Duplication will sneak through occasionally but at a much lower rate than without a design system.
Improving brand consistency and personality
Improving brand consistency and personality is arguably the other biggest benefit of a design system. When a large organization has multiple teams or individual contributors working on different products, website, apps, advertisements, communications… they can make different design decisions and create fragmented, confusing, and conflicting representations of the brand.
A design system provides a single source of truth and unites design guidelines and tools to help ensure everyone delivers designs that are clearly part of the same brand and promotes an impactful and strategic representation of the brand personality.
Helping ensure adherence to quality and standards
Similar to the above but worth calling out: design systems help ensure that all production adheres to high-quality and expected standards.
Supporting onboarding and internal collaboration
Design systems are excellent educational tools for new contributors joining an organization (whether employees or agency partners). Even if a person isn’t new, design systems are still good educational resources that contributors can reference easily. We love how a single source of truth helps improve internal collaboration. Projects go better when different teams or contributors are sitting at the same table with the same context!
What are the Cons of a Design System?
There are none? To be very judicious and fair, that’s not exactly true. Some designers feel stifled by design systems. We think that good design systems should not be so rigid or controlling that they do this. They’re supposed to support not dominate.
The other item of note, which isn’t a con but is an important consideration, is that design systems require a certain maturity level within an organization. They’re time-intensive to create and require regular, dedicated maintenance and management. Smaller organizations might not be ready to integrate a design system.
Approaching Adopting or Adapting a Design-System
There are several decisions that need to be made as an organization faces either adopting a new design system or optimizing an existing one.
Are you doing adoption/updates incrementally or all at once?
Have you evaluated your current UI inventory and are inconsistencies noted?
What are the main needs and goals of your design system?
Who is responsible for pulling together the different elements of the design system?
What design system library tool are you using or will you use?
What is the adoption plan?
What are adoption metrics that will be measured?
Design systems can dramatically change your operations and deliverables game. Given the depth of what they deliver, this just brushes the surface. If you’d like to talk more in-depth about design systems or how to adopt/adapt one, contact us. Cimarron Winter helps enterprises make the most of powerful and effective design systems.