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 function as agreements across design, development, product, marketing, and business teams to ensure consistency and speed.
-
•
A bottom-up approach starting with tokens (colors, typography, spacing) creates a solid foundation for scalable design systems.
-
•
Separating styles (colors, text styles) from symbols (UI components) in Sketch makes future updates easier and more reliable.
-
•
Organizing components in a device-agnostic way groups all versions (desktop, mobile, tablet) together, simplifying maintenance and updates.
-
•
Keeping component hierarchy flat avoids overwhelming designers with deep nested structures, improving usability and speed.
-
•
Managing overrides strictly in symbols helps enforce design rules by preventing breaking changes at the component instance level.
-
•
Establishing a design system council with representatives from design, dev, marketing, and business ensures collaborative evolution and consistency.
-
•
Using version starring in Sketch enables publishing only stable design system updates to users, avoiding constant disruptive notifications.
-
•
Content style and usage guidelines are often missing in design systems but should be included to align UX writing and messaging with design.
-
•
Iterating design system rules and allowing room for creative deviations help keep the system flexible and engaging rather than rigid and dull.
Notable Quotes
"Design system is basically an agreement that helps create consistency and familiarity in all the UIs you create."
"If you don't use styles for colors and typography, updating your brand color later means changing every component manually."
"Organizing your components device-agnostic makes updating all versions easier, even if it adds some complexity during design."
"Try to keep your component hierarchy as flat as you can — don't overdo levels or it becomes infinite navigation."
"Respect your design system rules to create consistency, but revisit them periodically because things evolve."
"Establish a design system council to bring together designers, developers, marketing, and business folks regularly."
"Managing overrides means you can prevent designers from changing things like colors or fonts in component instances."
"Starring versions lets you keep working on updates without pushing notifications to your whole design team until ready."
"The content portion of design systems is often manual and missing; you should include writing style guides and examples."
"Leave space for creativity in your design system because if you don't, it becomes dull and boring to design."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If design didn’t move the needle, we wouldn’t be having this conversation."
Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone
June 15, 2018
"Most strategy today is guesswork based on what others are doing, not based on situational awareness."
Simon WardleyMaps and Topographical Intelligence (Videoconference)
January 31, 2019
"White supremacy is the belief system of the superiority of whiteness that can embed itself in algorithms."
Sandra CamachoCreating More Bias-Proof Designs
January 22, 2025
"I held Jeff accountable by expecting criticism to come with rationale and intentional improvement."
Darian DavisLessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
January 8, 2024
"Providing more holistic recommendations helped us gain more trust and buy-in from stakeholders, increasing UX maturity."
Fisayo Osilaja[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist
June 4, 2024
"The seven-foot-wide diagram showed the product’s true complexity, sparking necessary conversations with leadership."
Uday GajendarThe Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX
May 13, 2015
"Investing in people and fostering collaboration always pays off in stronger teams and better user experiences."
Davis Neable Guy SegalHow to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team
June 10, 2021
"Once cash prizes were gone, people stopped feeling ownership of the design system."
Eniola OluwoleLessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site
October 24, 2019
"Finding a single source of truth for design documents and artifacts is extremely hard because most tools operate in silos."
Aurobinda Pradhan Shashank DeshpandeIntroduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts
September 9, 2022
