Member-only story
Can we get rid of these misconceptions about design systems?
Over the years, design systems have been a staple part of my day-to-day at every company I’ve worked at— sometimes starting off as mere UI kits, sometimes growing into fully-fledged systems, including tokens and docs.
These days, I’m working full-time on a design system team, which means I spend most of my day thinking about grids, tokens, component variants, naming conventions — and how to convince people they’re not as boring as they might sound.
Why are design systems still misunderstood?
Design systems are not a new concept — these days, design teams are able to create design systems that are pretty sophisticated and complex. Speaking to most team members on any product team, they will most likely tell you that having a design system is beneficial. No one really wants to recreate the same basic components over and over again (maybe there are some who do, but I haven’t met them.)
Despite how far we’ve come, there persists some skepticism and misalignment about design systems, not just from non-designers but from designers themselves.
This is why despite the leaps and bounds made by tools like Figma to enable designers and developers to work together on creating sophisticated design systems, we still face the…
