A day in the life of a Design System designer

My experiences spending all day, every day, thinking, building, and sharing a comprehensive design system.

I’m not using a literal megaphone in the morning, but it sometimes feels like that.

“What do you think? Stay on to own the Design System full-time. You’ll have the Lead UX Designer title, too.” I paused to take it in. I knew it wasn’t just owning a Figma file or two—I could own it end to end. The code, the documentation, the processes, the roadmap…

…all of it.

Sounds like a dream opportunity, right? Or a nightmare. This much ownership isn’t for everyone, and nor the right model for all businesses, but it worked for us. I want to share what my day-to-day typically looked like in this position, to help you shape your own day—if you ever get the privilege.

How we got here

I’m briefly covering the setup I was working with at Residently, as it’d be unfair to expect others to replicate my methods with a different setup, and get the same results.

Brief highlights include:

• Share a lot of resources with engineering, using worked code examples to illustrate—I even did a recorded talk titled “Organic Design Systems” for a local Manchester meet up, Social Code
• Introduced design tokens on our mobile app—this work helped us rapidly roll out a rebrand update 75% faster than estimated
• Started a greenfield project with design tokens and atomic design concepts as standard—being a Technical Lead allowed me to foster a tight designer-developer relationship, and prove the model on a smaller scale

N.B. I didn’t move the system forward every day, in the first year. Part of it was being patient and playing the waiting game. It’s counter productive to “force feed” all these new concepts, given delivery is a priority.

How I split my time

Additionally, it’s rare that someone gets the chance to spend 100% of their time working on and thinking about a Design System. I’m no exception—I spent perhaps 80% of my time on the system, and 20% on the design practice.

Design practice activities ranged from improving ways of working, to rolling up my sleeves and using…