A design system is a collection of reusable components, patterns, styles, and guidelines that aid in streamlining and optimizing design efforts. It is a set of standards intended to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency. A design system comprises various components, patterns, styles, and guidelines that aid in streamlining and optimizing design. It provides a set of guidelines for how a brand should look and feel across all channels and devices.
Some of the advantages of a design system are:
- Streamlined design to production workflow.
- Creates a unified language between and within the cross-functional teams.
- Faster builds, through reusable components and shared rationale.
- Better products, through more cohesive user experiences and a consistent design language.
- Improved maintenance and scalability, through the reduction of design and technical debt.
- Stronger focus for product teams, through tackling common problems so teams can concentrate on solving user needs.
Design systems can be used to manage designs at scale, and when implemented well, they can provide a lot of benefits to a design team. Design work can be created and replicated quickly and at scale, and the primary benefit of design systems is their ability to replicate designs quickly by utilizing premade UI components and elements. Design systems help teams get from an idea to a deliverable faster by reducing decisions like what font to use, where to place a button, or what a help message should look like.
Notable design systems include Lightning Design System (by Salesforce), Material Design (by Google), Carbon Design System (by IBM), and Fluent Design System (by Microsoft) . Design systems have been in practice for a long time under different nomenclatures, and they have had many changes and improvements since their origin. A design system should be thought of as a living document that is constantly evolving as a company grows and changes.
