Beyond the Figma File: A Design System as Living, Breathing Organism

Many people equate a design system to a collection of components, templates, and style guides residing within a Figma file. Reality is, however, far from this. 

A design system beholds the organization's identity and composed of the full palette of people inside a company, from executives, product owners, and managers down to analysts, developers, and designers. It is not in the colors of your logo or the shape of a button. It is the voice, vision, and value of the brand. Design system should be embedded in the organizational mindset to grow and evolve as the organization grows.

Brand Value Through Design System 

A design system, fundamentally, is the heart of the brand value and the brand promise in play. It is more than visual beauty and spans the entirety of user experience. It is not just a vault for icons and fonts; it is the voice of the company that describes service offerings, ethos, and ambitions for future products. If it's done properly, it maintains consistency so that each touchpoint with your customer feels unified and thoughtful. 

A Cross-Functional Team Collaboration 

An effective design system is a result of a well-orchestrated team collaboration between cross-functional units within an organization. Executives align the design system with the company's overarching vision and strategy. Product owners ensure that the system supports the needs of current and future product development. Managers oversee how the system is implemented and iterated upon. Analysts bring insights from data in response to informed decisions regarding design. Design system is living CSS and JS components within the developer's toolkit that target easy integration within the product. Designers make the elements by hand, iteratively refining and evolving them further. Everybody takes part in looking after the design system. It is a true company-wide effort. 

A design system is more than a Figma Library

It might start as a Figma library of reusable components, but it should reach toolsets within the organization.This means a repository of templates that can be pulled by anyone in an organization to create on-brand presentations and maintain a consistent external-facing message. A design system should be a well-documented, easily accessible source of truth, enabling every single person within an organization to design and create brand-consistent work.

Documentation forms a crucial part.

What is the point of a design system if it's unclear and hard to get to?. Well-documented systems become something of an operational blueprint for all parties involved—designers, developers, and stakeholders—on how to correctly use components within the system. Documentation captures every facet: guidelines for implementation, the side of why, code snippets, usage examples, and, of course, the ever-important rules of engagement for interaction patterns. 

Accessibility and Public Visibility

If your business has transferable services or products associated with them and they tend to external access, the availability and accessibility of the design system become the utmost priority. For example, if you're selling white-label solutions or licensing your product services to third-party integrations, an open design system will give them an easy process for implementing the brand within their ecosystem. Such transparency serves the purpose of accelerating adoption, ensuring your brand will survive and flourish in new spaces, and be consistent across different contexts.

The Design System Evolves 

Change is the only constant. 

A design system grows and evolves just like the teams or organizations it serves. While the system might start small—bounded around a handful of central automs—it will scale and expand as products themselves scale and change with the brand. Each new design trend, user behavior, or business need is a new reason for transformation, so there is development almost all the time in maintaining a design system. Every new iteration will need to be handled with care to avoid creating chaos, and all stakeholders will need to be kept in the loop through clear, constant communication and collaboration. 

Advocating and Maintaining the Design System

Given the importance of a design system, it is practical to allocate specific roles to care for it or advocate for it. The design system manager—or advocate—acts to support the system as a high priority for all organizational team members. The design manager should enable adoption, foster collaboration, and work through challenges that will surely emerge as systems scale across teams and products. She will also track feedback, supervise system enhancement, and ensure consistency of changes in the application of improvements across the product life cycle.

Conclusion, More Than a Kit 

It's a common framework that aligns teams across the organization to a single view of the brand's vision and goals. A holistic design system isn't locked in place at any point by setting things in stone; instead, it's based on collaboration, documentation, and evolution over time. It's almost like a living, breathing organism that needs care, needs attention, and should be constantly nourished for it to thrive according to the mission and values of the company.