Answering Your Questions About Design Systems

To save precious time and energy, and to keep those creative sparks from burning out too soon, more businesses are relying on existing design systems.

But what exactly is a design system as a service, and why does your business need one? We’ll look at these questions and dispel some of the myths surrounding this crucial tool.

What is a design system?

If you make a closet for your bedroom and end up with some of the wood and screws left over, you wouldn’t just throw them out — you would keep them for use on your next project. Despite the obvious common-sense benefits of a design system, many business owners are still reluctant to invest in one.

This is a shame because it means they are missing out on a whole lot of good stuff.

• Business scalability

With a design system in place, you have a handy reference point to view all the different components that make up a product’s design. Without this reference point, what do you do when the demand for your product increases? The answer is: it becomes difficult to respond with agility and to scale up production. In this sense, the design system becomes an important scalability asset.

• Brand identity

Your brand is made up of many elements that customers associate with your organization. This means you must consider every detail when crafting a new product, whether it’s a mobile app, an email template, a 3D printable or even letterhead for office communications. With a design system, all of your branding is baked in, so you know exactly which element to put where, ensuring consistency.

• Team productivity

This is a straightforward advantage — if your designers have access to a library of design elements, along with best practices and guidelines for use, they’ll become more productive. Of course, they’ll become more productive, which means they can focus their creative talents on more innovative projects.

• Smoother handovers

Holding a fleet of meetings at each stage of the design process, or having to go back to fix mistakes that weren’t spotted earlier, makes life seriously difficult. The design system keeps everyone on the same page every step of the way, ironing out costly errors.

• Long-term sustainability

If your best designs are all in the head — or, more likely, the hard drive — of your key designer, what happens when he or she leaves your company? This is an extreme example, but it does demonstrate how difficult it can be to onboard new personnel to your design team without a codified set of rules and best practices in place.

Unfortunately, there are still many myths surrounding design systems, so let’s put these to bed once and for all:

MYTH: A design system is just a style guide.

FACT: A design system is so much more than a style guide. It works like a Custom Style Sheet, or CSS, where design teams can add pre-crafted inputs. A well-planned design sheet builds on this basic functionality, creating a design sequence that can be easily repeated, refined, scaled, and modified as needed.

MYTH: A design system reduces the creativity of the design team because it teaches them to think only inside the box.

FACT: Design systems do not replace the efforts of design teams. Instead, they support these efforts. Rather than designing something new from scratch each time modifications are needed, the team can use a predetermined set of processes based on past work and existing design elements. This gives design teams the time to push their creativity to the max, creating new and exciting innovations for future products.

MYTH: Design systems are rigid and inflexible, only permitting actions within a very specific set of parameters.

FACT: Design systems and style guides are evolving all the time. Whenever your design team needs to create something new, they add the elements and processes used to the system’s library. This helps the design system grow organically, so it always reflects your organization’s design identity and objectives.