Building a Successful Design System
Welcome!
First of all, thank you for your interest. This is the first guide I create this way so thanks for the support and remember to reach out if you want me to add some detail to this guide. This is something I'm building on my own (without AI content) so if you feel like sharing it, it will help me a lot.
About me
I'm Emiliano, an Argentinian-Italian product designer. Over the last 8 years, I've been working on design systems for multiple companies while also sharing insights on platforms such as Smashing Magazine and several design events.
The goal of this guide
Design systems can be overwhelming when you’re starting this journey, especially when there is so much information that could result in confusion or information overload. You start looking at those from Google, Apple, and IBM and they're so complex you feel you'll never get there (spoiler alert: you probably won't even need to get there). On the other hand, you might open X/Twitter or Linkedin and read people talking about using Figma as a design system.
Thus, I wanted to create this guide where I share my experience and knowledge to guide you into the world of design systems and talk about the main required steps for building a successful one for your company, with a focus on all the strategic/political steps that normally are not shared.
Some topics I’ll cover
- What is a design system
- Benefits of a design system
- Size and tiers of a design system
- Strategies to sell the idea of a design system and get buy-in from stakeholders
- Building the DS team
- Define the workflows and governance
- Structure for design & component libraries + documentation
- How to structure, build & release components to production
- How to maintain a design system
Next: What is a Design System?
In my first article I will try to define a design system and give you a generic idea of how it composed and how it works.
Issue 01