An Introduction to Design Systems

Code condition for checking if is time to learn

This article introduces the fundamentals of design systems, explains their purpose, highlights notable industry examples, and explores their benefits in different development contexts. Let’s get started.

Glossary
What exactly are design systems?
Why design systems?
Design systems across the industry
Use cases
1. Single app development
2. Large enterprise applications ecosystem
Final Considerations
Further Reading

Glossary

UX: User Experience
UI: User Interface
MVP: Minimum Viable Product
DS: Design System

What exactly are design systems?

A design system is a comprehensive set of building blocks, standards, and documentation that ensures consistency in the look, feel, and behavior of digital products. It acts as a blueprint and unified language for teams, combining reusable UI components, design tokens (like colors and typography), and guidelines for both design and development. Unlike simple style guides, design systems encompass coding standards, usability principles, and best practices—bridging the gap between design and engineering for scalable, maintainable products. This bridge allows for a unified design language shared across the development process of a product.

Why design systems?

Design systems exist to solve the challenges of inconsistency, inefficiency, and miscommunication that arise when building and scaling digital products. Without a design system, teams often waste time recreating UI elements, introducing visual and functional inconsistencies, and facing collaboration hurdles between designers and developers. By providing a shared framework, design systems streamline development, enable rapid prototyping, ensure brand and UX consistency, and make it easier to maintain and scale products over time. DS are specially impactful on the scalability of digital products, as it ensures the foundation for the design of digital experiences are composed of parts designed to fit together, much like a car’s engine. Imagine if every car, of an equal model, year and manufacturer, had their engines built with variant specs, wouldn’t it be an engineers nightmare?!

Design systems across the industry

U.S. Web Design System: The official design system for the United States federal government provides resources for web applications from the NIH Library to NASA Glenn Research Center.
Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines: “Contains guidance and best practices that can help you design a great experience for any Apple platform” and is highly regarded in the industry as Apple has been at the forefront of user interfaces innovation since its inception.
Google’s Material Design: Google’s widely adopted system offers a robust set of principles, components, and tools for building visually consistent and accessible applications across platforms. “Material Design 3 is Google’s open-source design system for building beautiful, usable products” as described in their home page;
J.P. Morgan’s Salt Design System: From their overview page, “Salt is the J.P. Morgan design system, an open-source solution for building exceptional products and digital experiences in financial services and other industries”;
Salesforce Lightning Design System: “SLDS 2 includes the resources to create user interfaces consistent with Salesforce design principles, visual language, and best practices. Rather than spend time focusing on pixels, developers can focus on application logic and designers can focus on user experience, interactions, and flows. This system ensures creation across all Salesforce applications is consistent, accessible, and efficient”;
Atlassian Design System: “A collection of UI components, foundations, and standards that help teams build beautiful product experiences”, largely used and applied to Atlassian line of products.

Honorable mentions:

Encore at Spotify: Spotify Design provides insights and much more content related to how the company created a delightful and reimagined user experience for listening to music in the era of digital streaming and subscription services. As described in its Reimagining Design Systems at Spotify article of 2020, and I quote, “a design system isn’t one-size-fits-all—it needs to be tailored to the company’s needs”. See Spotify in Figma;
IBM’s Carbon Design System: ” Carbon is IBM’s open source design system for products and digital experiences. With the IBM Design Language as its foundation, the system consists of working code, design tools and resources, human interface guidelines, and a vibrant community of contributors”;
Uber’s Base design system: “The Base design system defines the foundations of user interfaces across Uber’s ecosystem of products & services. It brings all Uber experiences together under a single, unified framework.”

Use cases

Here are a few key benefits to implementing design systems in small and large endeavors:

Single app development

Accelerates prototyping and iteration by providing ready-to-use components;
Reduces design and development time, enabling faster MVP launches;
Ensures a cohesive and professional user experience from the start.

Large enterprise applications ecosystem

Maintains UX consistency across multiple products and teams, critical for brand trust and usability;
Reduces technical and design debt by standardizing patterns and processes;
Facilitates onboarding and collaboration for large, distributed teams, supporting successful product launches at scale.

Final Considerations

Design systems are foundational for delivering consistent, efficient, and scalable digital products. They bridge the gap between design and development, reducing friction and duplication of effort. Leading companies rely on robust design systems to maintain quality and speed as they grow. Whether for a single app or an enterprise ecosystem, adopting a design system is a strategic investment in product success.