Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Best Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System
Gold
Wednesday, June 7, 2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Share the love for this talk
Best Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System
Speakers: Jaime Creixems
Link:

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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Laureen Kattan
Centering Patients and Clinicians in a Complex Government Ecosystem
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
Lessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Bram Wessel
Enterprise Information Architecture (Videoconference)
2020 • Enterprise Community
Aaron Stienstra
Leveraging Civic Design to Advance Equity and Rebuild Trust in the US Federal Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Megan Kierstead
You Are a Badass at UX: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Ilana Lipsett
Anticipating Risk, Regulating Tech: A Playbook for Ethical Technology Governance
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Ovetta Sampson
Turning UX Passion into Real Product Influence
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Amy Gawronski Zuccaro
Advice for DesignOps Employee #1
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Jackie Velasquez-Ross
Talent Acquisition and Our Responsibility (Videoconference)
2020 • DesignOps Community
Marjorie Stainback
Transforming Strategic Research Capacity through Democratization
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Coffee with Lou #3: What Makes for a Successful UX Conference Presentation? (Videoconference)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Asia Hoe
Partnering with Product: A Journey from Junior to Senior Design
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Cassandra Piester
Developing and Deploying Your Design Operations Strategy
2024 • DesignOps 2024
Gold
Heidi Trost
To Protect People, You Have to Protect Information: A Human-Centered Design Approach to Cybersecurity
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
John Calhoun
Meters, Miles, and Madness: New Frameworks to Measure the (Elusive) Value of DesignOps
2024 • DesignOps 2024
Gold
Charlotte Lee
Theme 1 Intro
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold

More Videos

Jemma Ahmed

"Without shared organizational goals and customer-focused OKRs, democratization efforts fragment and fail to scale."

Jemma Ahmed Steve Carrod Chris Geison Dr. Shadi Janansefat Christopher Nash

Democratization: Working with it, not against it [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

July 24, 2024

Nina Jurcic

"Design systems are not just UI components but people and culture working together."

Nina Jurcic

The Design System Rollercoaster: From Enabler and Bottleneck to Catalyst for Change

October 3, 2023

Nathan Curtis

"The design system is a living, breathing thing that evolves constantly because you’re constantly learning and responding to needs."

Nathan Curtis Nalini P. Kotamraju Jack Moffett Dawn Ressel

Discussion

June 9, 2016

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"When tactical metrics end up on the left side and KPIs on the right side of the compass, that signals we need a longer conversation about what we measure."

Saara Kamppari-Miller Nicole Bergstrom Shashi Jain

Key Metrics: Comparing Three Letter Acronym Metrics That Include the Word “Key”

November 13, 2024

Malini Rao

"We added an in-product feedback framework and used the UMUX scale to get feedback at scale and distinguish true pain points."

Malini Rao

Lessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey

June 9, 2021

Mackenzie Cockram

"The website redesign is much more than a redesign; it’s a complete change in content and design strategy."

Mackenzie Cockram Sara Branco Cunha Ian Franklin

Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Research from Discovery to Live

December 16, 2022

Bria Alexander

"Even virtually, we are a community obligated to treat each other with kindness and respect."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

June 9, 2021

Jackie Ho

"Many product teams have never come face to face with their revenue numbers before."

Jackie Ho

Lead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards

January 8, 2024

Dan Hill

"Private cars are parked 95% of the time, making them highly inefficient in urban environments."

Dan Hill

Designing for the infrastructures of everyday life

June 4, 2024