Introduction:
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, new products are constantly emerging. As a result, it’s becoming crucial for businesses to maintain brand recognition. To accomplish this, they need to develop a design system that ensures a consistent look, feel, and functionality across all their products while allowing flexibility for diverse visual appearances.
Why to Create a Design System
A design system fosters consistency, streamlining both the design and development processes. By leveraging proven best practices, it accelerates the production of digital products. Moreover, it enhances usability, giving businesses a competitive advantage through cohesive and user-centric designs.
The benefits of design systems are precious for businesses involved in complex design projects. If a product can be designed and developed more efficiently with less time and effort, why opt for a more complicated approach? While building and maintaining a design system does require dedicated effort, the long-term gains make it worthwhile.
What is a Design System?
A design system serves a wide range of professionals, including designers, developers, leaders, content strategists, accessibility experts, marketers, and brand designers.
It provides a foundation for creating digital products that are coherent and consistent. A well-structured design system offers clear guidance to product creators while remaining flexible enough to accommodate the varying needs of different projects. Additionally, it should evolve alongside the brand, adapting to changes and growth over time.
How to Approach Design Systems
There are various ways to implement a design system within a company. One option is to adopt an existing system, which offers the benefit of a ready-made set of well-established design solutions. This approach requires minimal effort to implement and is often a cost-effective solution.
However, most off-the-shelf design systems still need alignment from a dedicated design system team. If you choose to customize a design system, it will typically require additional work to tailor it to your business's specific needs. While this approach demands more time and effort than simply adopting a pre-existing system, it results in a more flexible solution that can elevate your digital products.
Alternatively, you might decide to build a design system from the ground up. This route allows for complete customization, ensuring that every element aligns perfectly with your company’s branding and other unique factors. Although creating a bespoke system requires significant time and effort, it can yield substantial long-term benefits. A unique design system empowers designers and developers to create any digital product or component within the company, fostering continuous improvement and evolution of the system.
Best Practices for Building a Design System
Set clear objectives for the design system to align it with product goals.
Create thorough documentation that’s easy for the entire team to understand and follow.
Leverage variables and tokens to ensure consistency, scalability, and efficiency, allowing for quick, system-wide updates and reducing time waste.
Ensure all guidelines and components meet accessibility standards for an inclusive design.
Assign clear ownership to oversee the system’s management and upkeep.
Use version control to monitor changes and updates effectively.
Continuously review and update the design system, ensuring proper governance and maintenance at every stage of production.
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