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Creating a design system for an MVP

Recently I was designing a new product from scratch and created a design system from the beginning. This has proven to be beneficial when a new member joined the team and immediately managed to start contributing to the project. This inspired me to share my experience.

Aleksandra Walczak
UX Collective
4 min readJan 24, 2021
A screenshot from the design system in figma

Where to start?

While developing a new product, there are two obvious choices in terms of a design system:

  1. Use an existing one
  2. Create your own

For the project, we needed the flexibility of defining our own elements. I started looking for a ready design system but the ones I found were either too simple or too complex for our needs at that time. I finally decided to go with a third option: use basic elements such as buttons, checkboxes, and input fields from an existing design system, that I later customized while the product evolved.

The Start — Colors and typography

In the beginning, I started with a low-fidelity prototype and applied generic shades of grey and five text style to create the basic hierarchy. Once the project started evolving, I adjusted those…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Aleksandra Walczak

ux designer, idealist, trained architect, mountain lover, improv practitioner, www.olka.design

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