A design system serves as the shared language of an organization by aligning designers, developers, and product managers, improving collaboration and making it easier to build and maintain digital products. Design systems come in many forms, including brand identities, toolkits, products or even organizational processes, and they evolve with the needs and maturity of an organization. The ultimate goal of a design system is to deliver a consistent, unified user experience across all digital interactions.
Design System: Growth Engine for Modern Products
Robert Goesch • 27.01.2025
In today’s digital landscape, where user experience plays a critical role in the success of a business, design systems have emerged as a powerful tool. However, we've noticed that design systems are often viewed as a mere tool, rather than a system capable of driving the performance of your entire organization. That is why, in this article, we will define a design system, explain why you should have one, when you should pass it on, what a design system is made up of and finally and ultimately how you can put yourself in the starting position to tackle your own design system.
Rethinking Design Systems with a Systems Perspective
Design systems are systems. It's pretty obvious, but it's often overlooked or misunderstood what the word "system" actually means in the context of "design".
As Jared Spool succinctly puts it, "Design is the rendering of intent." This definition emphasizes the crucial relationship between the intended outcome and the process that makes it reality.
Similarly, Donella H. Meadows defines a system as "an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something." This means that every system contains elements, interconnections and a purpose.
Bringing these two definitions together, a design system can be seen as an intentional set of interconnected elements that work cohesively to produce consistent and repeatable results in human interaction.
To get the system up and running, we need to think about what it is for, what it is made of and how it all works together.
A metaphor to understand systems
To fully grasp what a system entails, let's compare it to a well-run kitchen. This is much easier to understand as we have all experienced it.
Purpose (what it is for): Imagine you're in the kitchen with the goal of preparing dinner. This purpose drives every decision you make and action you take. Whether you're cooking a simple salad or a complex dish, your goal shapes the ingredients you choose and the steps you follow. It's the very reason you're in the kitchen.
Elements (what it is made of): To achieve your purpose of making dinner, you need specific ingredients and tools—the elements of your kitchen system. These include vegetables, spices, pots, pans, knives, the stove, and even the chef (it might be you, or someone else). Each element plays a crucial role in helping you reach your goal.
Interconnections (how it all works together): The interconnections are how these elements interact to fulfill the purpose. Chopping vegetables with a knife, sautéing them on the stove, and combining ingredients according to a recipe are all examples of interconnections. The relationships between elements—how you mix ingredients and apply cooking techniques—transform raw materials into a finished meal. Timing, technique, and coordination are essential parts of these interactions.
Understanding how these key aspects work together helps emphasizing that it's not just about the individual parts but how they collectively achieve a cohesive and efficient outcome. Just as a well-runned kitchen empowers you to consistently create delicious dishes to the minute, a design system empowers your organization to produce cohesive, high-quality designs. It’s the foundation that ensures efficiency and consistency across all your design projects, enabling your team to work like master chefs.
A Business Perspective: Purpose and Benefits of a Design System
Before you get started with the implementation, it's important to think about why you want to have a design system in the first place. That's the most important question, but it's often overlooked. People often see a design system as just a technical collection of assets and get bogged down in the technical details, rather than asking themselves what they actually want to achieve with their design system. Think about it thoroughly, because a system can actually produce intended and unintended results.
A great way to get your goals for your design system right is to use design thinking and ask yourself what problem you actually want to solve. You can also look at it from the biggest bottlenecks in your organization, which the design system should help you address and overcome. We typically see the following problems that a design system should help tackle:
- Design Inconsistencies
- Process Bottlenecks
- Reduction in Technical Debt
- Accessibility Oversights
- Delayed Time-to-Market
- Inconsistent Branding
- Redundant Work and Resource Wastage
- Onboarding Difficulties
- Scalability Issues
- Miscommunication and Errors
- Difficulty in Maintaining Quality Standards
- Lack of Skill
Benefits of getting Design Systems right
Implementing a design system can bring numerous benefits to enterprises, ranging from improved design consistency to increased development efficiency. Here are some key reasons why enterprises should consider investing in a design system:
- Improved Efficiency: Accelerate workflows and reduce time to market with pre-built UI components, driving faster product launches.
- Scalable Solutions: Ensure design and development efforts scale effortlessly as companies grow.
- Consistency Across Platforms: Maintain a consistent look and feel across all digital touchpoints with a shared repository of design elements.
- Improved Usability: Standardized UI components and patterns help users quickly adapt, reduce cognitive load, and make navigation user interfaces more intuitive.
- Improved Accessibility: Incorporate accessibility standards consistently to ensure inclusivity across digital products.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Establish a shared language between teams to reduce misunderstandings and improve collaboration.
The Downside of a Design System
Honestly, there are situations where design systems can become a burden instead of a catalyst for growth. Systematization inherently means standardizing processes to achieve consistent results, which can limit creative flexibility. This doesn't imply that a design system strips away your brand's unique identity, but it does make it more challenging to break out of predefined patterns. If your organization has a significant need for individualization, a rigid design system may reduce its advantages and require frequent workarounds, turning it into a persistent obstacle that leads to rejection. Therefore, the more willing you are to embrace systematization, the greater the benefits you can reap. Conversely, if individualization is a priority, it's crucial to balance standardization with flexibility to prevent the design system from becoming a hindrance.
A Technical Perspective: Elements of a Design System
A Design System consists of various elements. It's important to understand that you don't need to have all of them in place to start seeing benefits.
- Style Guide
- Design Principles
- Design Tokens
- Component Library
- Pattern Library
- Page Types
- Documentation
- Tools
- Contributor and Consumer
Each element you add enhances overall consistency and streamlines collaboration across teams. Below, we explore the key elements of a design system, recognizing that integrating even a few can significantly improve your design and development processes.
Style Guide
The style guide is an essential part of each design system, as it provides detailed guidelines on the visual and functional aspects of your brand, including typography, color schemes, iconography or tone of voice. Ensuring that all communication, whether in design or content, aligns with the brand’s core values and maintains a recognizable brand identity.
Design Principles
These are the guiding principles that define the overall design philosophy and goals of the organization. They serve as a North Star for design decisions and help maintain a unified design language.
Design Tokens
Design tokens are the core elements that define your design system's visual properties, such as colors, spacing, typography, and more. They ensure consistency across different platforms and allow for seamless updates and scalability.
Component Library
A component library is a curated collection of reusable UI components that can be easily assembled to create user interfaces. It includes essential elements like buttons, forms, and navigation menus, which help streamline the design and development process.
Pattern Library
Patterns are recurring solutions to common design problems within your system, such as error handling, navigation and more. They ensure that similar problems are solved in a consistent way, improving usability and efficiency across your digital products.
Page Types
Page types offer predefined layouts and structures for different kinds of pages. They help standardize the creation of new user interfaces, ensuring a cohesive user experience and reducing the time spent on design decisions.
Documentation
Clear and comprehensive documentation is an essential part of a design system. It provides guidance on how to use and customize UI components, UX patterns, and design tokens for design and development. Ensuring that teams can implement the system effectively across projects and departments.
Tools
Tools are the software and platforms you use to create, maintain and implement your design system. They include design and development software, as well as collaboration platforms. Using the right tools makes your design system more productive and accessible to all team members.
Contributor and Consumer
The people who interact with the design system. Contributors include designers, developers and product managers who actively build, maintain and update the system. Consumers are team members who use the elements of the system in their daily work.
An Organizational Perspective: Interconnections of a Design System
To make your design system work, you need to think about how the different elements of your design system affect and work with each other to create the desired outcome. It's about how people work together, the rules they follow when they're using the system, and how the organization as well as the system is structured. This point often determines how efficient and effective the design system can be.
Organize Thoughtfully: Choose an organizational model for your design system that fits your team structure and goals. Whether you choose a solitary, centralized, or federated model, it is important that it remains accessible and fosters team spirit.
Establish a Single Source of Truth: Ensure design and code stem from the same source, with design leading the structure in close collaboration with development. This alignment prevents discrepancies, maintains flexibility, and enhances efficiency, keeping your design system consistent and reliable.
A System of Systems: A design system does not operate in isolation. It is embedded in a larger system and usually contains smaller subsystems that serve, for example, different platforms, products or brands. This hierarchical organization is a key feature of complex systems.
Examples of Successful Design System Implementations
Implementing a design system can yield significant benefits for enterprises across various industries. Here are a few case studies that highlight successful design system implementations:
Slack Design System: Slack Kit
Slack, a leading collaboration platform, introduced the Slack Kit design system to simplify its user interface and ensure consistency across its applications. By leveraging prototyping and user testing, Slack Kit improved development efficiency and facilitated faster feature rollouts, such as Dark Mode. The system also enhanced collaboration between teams and allowed for scalable, adaptable design solutions.
Spotify Design System: Encore
Spotify, the world’s largest music streaming service, consolidated 22 design systems into Encore, a unified framework supporting over 45 platforms. Encore streamlined design and engineering efforts, improving consistency across Spotify’s applications. Moving forward, Spotify aims to enhance Encore by refining analytics and establishing key metrics to optimize system adoption and satisfaction.
IBM Design System: Carbon
IBM, a global technology leader, implemented the open-source Carbon design system to standardize and scale design practices across its platforms. Within ten months, adoption grew seven-fold, with 44.8% of IBM.com page views attributed to Carbon-built pages. Carbon also helped IBM scale responsible design, including accessibility standards, across its diverse product ecosystem.
The Best Design Systems 2025
If you want to set up your own design system, it may be worth looking at existing systems. You may even be able to build on them. We have compiled the best design systems of 2025 and rated them according to their strengths and weaknesses.
Future Trends in Design Systems
What we can observe is that the requirements and possibilities for building a design system are changing rapidly. Essentially, it's about structuring and documenting your design elements in a way that allows human-readability but also machine-readability to interpret, manipulate, and generate design assets effectively.
As technology and design practices continue to evolve, design systems are expected to play an increasingly important role in your product development process. Here are a few trends that are worth creating the right conditions for:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) Integration: AI technologies can enhance design systems by automating repetitive design tasks, generating design variations, and providing data-driven insights for design decision-making.
- Design Tokens and Automation: The standardization and automation of design tokens are streamlining design systems, ensuring consistent visual properties across platforms. Automated updates apply changes across all UI components in both design and code.
- Design Systems for Inclusive Design: Design systems will continue to embrace inclusive design principles, ensuring that digital products are accessible and usable by all users, regardless of their abilities or disabilities.
These trends underscore the growing importance of adaptable, scalable design systems that can keep pace with the rapidly changing landscape of digital design and technology. By providing a centralized source of truth and a set of guidelines and assets, design systems empower teams to create cohesive and user-friendly digital experiences. As design systems continue to evolve, decision-makers must stay informed about current best practices and future trends to effectively leverage this powerful tool for their organizations.
The Greater the Adoption, the Greater the Return on Investment
A design system serves as more than just a set of guidelines or assets; it functions as a system that can catalyze growth by enhancing efficiency, ensuring consistency, and enabling scalability. By implementing a design system, organizations position themselves to respond more quickly to market demands, innovate more freely, and provide a better overall user experience. All essential components of sustainable growth.
When you decide on a design system, you have to start systematizing things. From organization to production to construction. Even if it hurts. And it will. Because what seems better in one case may not be better for the system.
The question then becomes whether to rely on an existing system or build one from the ground up. To make it short: No two systems are alike. Systems may share the same elements as a component library, for example, but in the end it is the interaction of all elements within an organization that make up the system.
Look around and be inspired. But in the end, you have to build your own. Tweak it, customize it, install it. You have to master it to benefit from it. Because at the end of the day, the greater the adoption, the greater the return on investment.
