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How to start building a design system
A step-by-step guide to bring a design system into your company without losing your mind.
A design system can solve your problems with quality, speed, maintainability, and more. It is seen as a drop-in solution that everyone should have. But is this actually true?
Should you start building a design system for your company? And if so, how do you start?
This article provides steps to evaluate if you need a design system. It also shares my recommended steps to start building your design system.
Benefits of design Systems
Design systems are great at solving some specific problems¹. A design system can be a great solution if you encounter those problems at your company. If you don’t experience any of those issues, a design system will probably not help much.
But maybe you’re so used to certain problems that you don’t notice them anymore. So, investigate carefully.
I will outline some of the biggest challenges a design system can help with below.
Ensuring consistency and quality while scaling
A design system is a great tool to improve consistency² through components, tokens, and patterns.
Keeping everything in sync is easy when you only have one app, and the team is so small. One person can sign off everything and assure high product quality. But when the team and the number of products grow this gets harder and the sign-off becomes a bottleneck.
A design system solves this by providing components, colors, text styles, and more. If everyone uses the design system, you only need to make sure it is consistent and of high quality. Instead of signing off every product you focus on the design system.
