Summary
Design systems are essential for creating cohesive and scalable products. By providing a shared set of design guidelines, components, and styles, design systems help ensure consistency and efficiency throughout the design process. In this talk we’ll go through the best practices when creating and maintaining a Design System including different strategies, approaches to token creation, making good use of overrides, setting up principles and guidelines and how to scale a design system so that it becomes useful for design a dev teams alike.
Key Insights
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Design systems provide consistency and speed to design processes, benefiting all stakeholders.
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An atomic design model is useful for structuring design components from basic tokens to templates.
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Separate styles from symbols to simplify updates and maintain consistency across designs.
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A device-agnostic approach to organizing components makes scaling easier and updates more efficient.
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Flat hierarchies in component organization help avoid navigation complexity within design systems.
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Establish a design system council for regular reviews and collaboration between stakeholders.
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Effective documentation is crucial for onboarding new team members and revisiting design system rules.
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Iterate on rules regularly to ensure they remain relevant and applicable as products evolve.
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Utilize design tools' features to enhance workflow efficiency and maintain a healthy design system.
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Allow space for creativity to keep the design process engaging and innovative.
Notable Quotes
"A design system is an agreement that creates consistency across UIs."
"It provides one source of truth for all team members."
"If you use color variables, one change updates everything."
"Try to make your component hierarchy as flat as possible."
"The Boy Scout approach applies: you're done when you can't take anything else out."
"Design systems should accommodate both current needs and future scalability."
"Regularly revisit the rules of your design system; they might not apply as your product evolves."
"Iteration is the golden rule of design; no design is ever perfect."
"Include all stakeholders in your design system council for comprehensive insights."
"Document everything to ensure continuity and clarity in your design practices."
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