Design Systems and how to develop consistent and scalable products with them

Your design system isn't just a style guide—it's a living product. Learn the five steps to build, maintain, and evolve one for scalable development.

#1about 5 minutes

Understanding the core components of a design system

A design system is a single source of truth built on a style guide, a component library, and a pattern library.

#2about 2 minutes

Step 1: Convincing stakeholders with data-driven inventories

Create inventories of existing styles and components to highlight inconsistencies and redundancies, then convert these findings into numbers to get stakeholder buy-in.

#3about 2 minutes

Step 2: Researching user needs and auditing existing resources

Understand who will use the design system by interviewing them, auditing current processes, and creating a glossary of terms to align teams.

#4about 3 minutes

Step 3: Designing the style guide and component library

Choose your design tools and start by defining essential styles like colors and typography before moving on to creating your first components and patterns.

#5about 1 minute

Step 4: Crafting the system with code and documentation

Select the right technologies and frameworks, set up a CI/CD pipeline, and build out the libraries with tests and technical documentation.

#6about 3 minutes

Step 5: Maintaining and evolving the design system

Establish contribution models, create communication channels, find team ambassadors, and continuously measure success to ensure long-term adoption.

#7about 8 minutes

Documenting components with a live Storybook demo

Storybook helps document components by providing self-hosting, add-ons like Figma integration, and interactive stories for different component variants.

#8about 7 minutes

Q&A: Decoupling from tech and handling legacy systems

Discussion on using design tokens to remain technology-agnostic, inventorying existing systems to merge them, and creating stories for complex components.