April 10, 2019 by Tomek

Looking for a way of improving your design-development workflow? You need a design system! Why? Because it will help you work better, much faster & will take your team collaboration to the next level!

Design system is a very popular concept, arousing a lot of emotions and interest recently … even the government of United States of America has one they call U.S. Web Design System.

What’s Design System

A design system is a collection of reusable graphical components, design standards, style guides, which define a common visual language for product teams. It accelerates the design process and bridges the gap between teams involved in building a final product by having clear graphics standards, that makes assembling websites from components super easy. So basically the design system is a rulebook for graphical and development teams which we can breakdown like that:

Design System – the complete set of design standards along with principles, patterns & code components to achieve them,

– the complete set of design standards along with principles, patterns & code components to achieve them, Pattern Library – a subclass of a design system which defines allowed design patterns,

– a subclass of a design system which defines allowed design patterns, Style guide – a subclass showing how products should look, containing use cases for UI patterns, typography etc.

Source: Zack Rutherford for Studio by UXPin

The benefits

Design systems provide consistency in designing new elements of your company or product visual identification. Design system creates straightforward and beautiful experiences for end-user as well as product team makes collaboration a lot easier for:

designers as they can breakdown the design-process into smaller parts, easier to work on, manage, change than the whole webpage,

as they can breakdown the design-process into smaller parts, easier to work on, manage, change than the whole webpage, developers so they clear vision of how to build required components to maintain the unified styles,

so they clear vision of how to build required components to maintain the unified styles, product owners/managers as component-based approach makes requesting development teams for additional page elements a super easy process

Examples

You have all probably heard about the famous Material Design by Google:

but that’s not the only one you can draw inspiration from as big companies like IBM, Audi or Atlassian make their design system publicly available. Here you can take a look at a couple of them:

Carbon React Components by IBM

Zendesk Garden

Atlassian Design System

Polaris by Shopify

Looking for more?

Make sure to visit https://designsystemsrepo.com/design-systems/ for more samples & inspirations!