Best Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System
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
-
•
Design systems serve as agreements that align design, development, product, and marketing teams around consistent UI rules.
-
•
The atomic design model builds UI from basic tokens to atoms, molecules, and templates, promoting scalable component creation.
-
•
Separating styles (colors, typography) from symbols (UI components) enables easy global updates in design systems.
-
•
A device-agnostic organization of components simplifies multi-platform updates by grouping variants inside each component.
-
•
Flat component hierarchies prevent navigation complexity and speed up UI element discovery and usage.
-
•
Documenting design system decisions and architecture helps onboard new team members and maintain consistency over time.
-
•
Managing overrides restricts what can be changed in component instances, reducing inconsistencies and errors.
-
•
Establishing a design system council with cross-functional stakeholders ensures alignment and evolves the system thoughtfully.
-
•
Version starring in tools like Sketch allows safe iterative work without disturbing team members until updates are published.
-
•
Including content guidelines and examples in design system documentation is essential but often underdeveloped and manual.
Notable Quotes
"Design system is basically an agreement that helps create a sense of consistency and familiarity in all the UIs that you create."
"Keeping styles separate from symbols makes it much easier to update colors or typography across your entire system."
"If you organize your design system device agnostic, you can update one component with all desktop, mobile, and tablet versions inside."
"Try to make your component hierarchy as flat as possible because tall, nested structures become hard to navigate."
"Respect your design system rules to ensure consistent experiences across your product and teams."
"Establish a design system council where all stakeholders gather regularly to maintain and evolve the system."
"Use the latest version starring feature so your team only gets updates when they’re ready, avoiding constant notifications."
"Iteration is the golden rule of design, including iterating on your design system rules themselves."
"Leave some space for creativity in your design system so designers can innovate without breaking consistency."
"Document your design decisions and architecture visually so new team members can quickly understand your system."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Companies are no longer dependent on where people are located to work."
Lavy Kumar Kat Temple Shan Sebastian Tara Jensen Jenn ChouFuture of Work
June 9, 2021
"The pandemic pushed us to be creative, and it’s been fun for users to participate remotely in the design process."
Andreas Huebner Amy Takata Craig BrookesWhat Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?
March 11, 2021
"Startups struggle daily with pricing, and conjoint analysis is the single most underrated tool to find optimal prices."
Ricardo MartinsUnlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods
March 12, 2025
"If you get enough good behavior going on, the system corrects itself and susses out the bad."
Monty HammontreeThe Future of UX Research
December 3, 2020
"The design ops team helped designers print in BBA’s complicated systems, something they had to do alone after we lost the ops team."
Benjamin RealShowing the Value of DesignOps by Not Having a DesignOps Team
October 21, 2020
"It is impossible for one research ops person to do all the things expected in job descriptions."
Kate TowseyAsk Me Anything (AMA) with Kate Towsey
April 2, 2025
"Both tribes really believe in doing awesome for customers, that’s our common ground."
Steve Portigal Chris Chapo Kelly Goto Christian RohrerDiscussion
May 13, 2015
"If it didn’t come from Amazon or Costco, I probably don’t own it because I know the experience will be consistent."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
March 28, 2023
"Most of the work on accessible prototyping for screen readers is still in early or mid research stages but is improving rapidly."
Sam ProulxPrototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
October 1, 2021
