What is design system?
A single source of design truth
A design system is a consolidation of an organisation’s visual identity, strategy, brand values, purpose and audiences into shared practices, principles, design patterns, templates, themes and end products such as websites and printed media.
It acts as the single source of truth for everything a brand will deliver visually, and otherwise. It’s a playbook for how a brand and strategy translates into real-world assets.
It is constantly evolving, a living thing, and as such is never ‘finished’. As an organisation or brand grows, the number of outputs to maintain grows, and the design system grows along with them.
They’re not for everyone
One of the major benefits of implementing a design system is increasing the speed of design and, by extension, reducing the overhead involved in repeating tasks.
Therefore, for smaller organisations and brands with very few design outputs, the benefit of using a design system is often negated by the cost of implementation.
But, organisations with an array of different design outputs, both online and offline, benefit hugely.
Design system examples:
Benefits of a design system
Consistency
Achieve visual consistency across a suite of online properties as well as consistency in terms of accessibility, tone of voice and functionality, meaning your organisation’s brand can live and breathe online just as well as it does offline.
Increased Speed, Quality and Creativity
Having a clear set of base rules and components makes doing the every day work a breeze. The bonus of reducing repetitive and menial tasks is that a design team can invest more time coming up with creative solutions to your more complex user needs.
Reduced overheads
Because of the improvements in speed we save time, and therefore money, when creating new properties or maintaining our existing ones. Win win!
Collaboration
Having a single overarching project that underpins everything you deliver online, helps bring teams together that might otherwise be working in silos on separate projects, aligning their goals and giving them a singular focus.
