Creating consistency with Design Systems - and saving costs

Designers and developers know the problem: with every new product, platform or project developed by a company, the challenges also grow. Constantly changing requirements in terms of technology, usability and strategy mean that designs quickly become outdated and confusing. Without structured processes, "Frankenstein products" are created that are reminiscent of a patchwork.

This is where design systems come into play. They offer a systematic solution by linking all elements in a logical sequence and allowing them to be updated globally. This allows teams to access standardized basic elements in real time and work together more efficiently. Design systems are revolutionizing the industry and making the classic relaunch superfluous.

Brad Frost first presented the "Atomic Design" concept back in 2013. This is a modular approach to web development that is based on the periodic table of elements. Today, this approach serves as a methodological basis for design systems.

Frost divides web design into five levels:

• Atoms: UI Core Components that cannot be broken down further. These include HTML tags, form elements, and buttons.
• Molecules: Consist of multiple atoms that are combined to create simple UI components, for example, form label, search input, and button can be combined to create a "search form molecule".
• Organisms: are made up of molecules and atoms. This results in complex components and modules, such as a header bar with logo, navigation, and search field.
• Templates: Page layouts that define the placement of organisms and demonstrate the underlying content structure as well as the function of all elements in the context of the layout.
• Pages: Page templates that show a user interface with real representative content in different variations.

A design system encompasses all aspects of design and brand experience development in a company for platforms, products, or services. The following components are interlinked:

• Design guidelines: Rules and principles to define the design of user interfaces. Design guidelines specify how fundamentals (e.g. colors, typography, grid and motion) are used and define the visual aesthetics of layout principles and UI patterns.
• Component Libraries: A collection of reusable tokens, styles, and UI core components (e.g. buttons, input fields, and tabs) that are consistently designed and structured according to current best practices.
• Templates & Pages: Style sheets for different types of page types or product flows. They show the design and development teams how the developed elements can be used in combination with each other. This ensures that the design remains consistent across different parts of a project.
• Brand Resources: Integration of brand assets such as logos, icon system and illustrations, as well as guidelines on how to use them in context.
• Documentation: A comprehensive guide to using the design system. The documentation contains tutorials, design and code examples and explanations on the correct implementation of design elements.
• Governance: A process for capturing feedback given by designers, developers and other stakeholders to continuously improve the design system. This can include feedback loops, surveys, reviews, or other communication channels.

A design system brings numerous advantages that optimize the entire development process and increase the quality of the results.

1. Consistency across different products

A design system ensures a standardized appearance and user experience across all of a company's products and platforms. This strengthens the brand identity and creates trust among users.

2. Facilitated collaboration between design and development

When creating the design system, designers and developers agree on a common language, clear guidelines, and structure. This speeds up the everyday development process immensely, improves communication and minimizes misunderstandings. For example, designers can communicate their visions precisely, while developers have concrete, reusable components to hand.

3. Increased efficiency in the development process

The reuse of design modules and standardized code components significantly reduces development time. Teams can concentrate on innovative and cross-platform solutions instead of dealing with recurring tasks. The rapid integration of new requirements, such as a switch to barrier-free web design, is thus significantly simplified.

4. Error reduction and quality improvement

Design systems minimize the likelihood of errors as tried and tested components are used. This leads to higher product quality and stability as much less time has to be spent on troubleshooting.

You don't get all this for free: a design system requires a high initial investment and additional ongoing maintenance. It is worthwhile if the initial and ongoing costs are exceeded by the design and development work saved. This is regularly the case when projects are large, complex, and long-term and require many recurring design elements. In such scenarios, the investment is quickly amortized by the improved efficiency and quality of the results, making a design system a sensible and economical decision.

A design system and a pattern library are tools used in software development to promote the consistent and efficient design of user interfaces. Although they have similar goals, there are fundamental differences between them:

To summarize: A design system offers a comprehensive and strategic approach to design management, while a pure pattern library focuses on the practical collection and documentation of reusable design patterns.

Nevertheless, pattern libraries are an essential component of design systems and are therefore built up as a basis in the first steps of systems and continuously developed further during the process.