How To Create A Design System: A Quick Guide

When it comes to design, people find a lot of value in systems. It’s easier to follow an established process to look back on your work for signs of improvement throughout the project.

A system is also a great way to share ideas across groups of people, like marketing folks or developers.

Understanding Design Systems

It is an important step towards creating effective, sustainable, and scalable user interfaces. They are a way to make design reusable and predictable by treating the design process as an iterative one.

You don’t need to worry about designing each piece of your interface individually. By using a single system for the entire project, you will have a much easier time figuring out which components should go together to provide the user with the best experience possible.

Creating a Design System

Creating a design system requires quite a bit of hard work up front. While you can do it in an hour or two, the real benefit comes from the long-term use you will be able to get out of it.

Systems are made up of three main things:

Design Assets

These are the components that will go into the system. They may include features that have already been designed and more basic interface elements like typography, forms, buttons, icons, and more.

Design Principles

These are the guidelines that you will use for your design system. They are statements that define why a component is designed a certain way, leading to better features and more consistent results.

Design System Based on Semantic HTML

This helps make everything work together by providing an underlying HTML framework for you to build your components on top of. The design system makes your components reusable and scalable, making them easier for you to create a better user experience and other people on your team.

Additional considerations

• Systems make it much easier to design for the long term. You only have to deal with one system instead of having to create everything from scratch each time.
• You need to decide when and how to use design systems right away. If you don’t use them initially, you will waste all that time spent creating your initial design and any techniques that did not work out well in the future.
• If you decide to use a system for your project, you will need to make sure that the content on the site and other systems incorporated into the project align with your content and objectives.
• Systems are also not a cure-all. You can’t build everything using a design system. It would be pretty challenging to do so when it comes down to it.
• Systems can also be complicated to create if you don’t have experience or the right people on your team. It can be difficult to make sure that everyone is on the same page as your design principles go.

Conclusion

Design systems are a constructive way to guide your product and team. They can help you work on these systems much more efficiently and share them with others. You will create a lasting user experience for your users to appreciate and enjoy for years to come.