Why we’re in love with Design Systems
Design principles shared across all stakeholders
Design Systems are making a huge impact on clients, as everyone has a shared understanding of the design principles and best practices for their business. They also help to promote collaboration between different teams and stakeholders ensuring everyone is aligned with the key design principles.
Why is this so important?
A Design System is a collection of reusable components with established standards for how they should be used and combined to build digital products. Products such as websites, apps, and portals benefit from a structured design system. Many organizations use design systems to address common problems associated with designing and developing digital assets, ensuring design consistency and reducing time-to-market.
Is a design system right for your organization?
To help determine whether a design system is right for you, we’ve highlighted some of the most common scenarios where it can be beneficial:
- Design Consistency: A design system helps ensure that your design is applied consistently across various platforms and screen sizes. This serves as a single source of truth for everyone involved in the project.
- Streamlined Communications: A design system can facilitate team and cross-team collaborations, simplifying the process of providing feedback and reducing the amount of time required to explain how design elements should be coded.
- Faster Design and Development: A design system can significantly reduce development time and costs by enabling designers to reuse components and prevents developers from having to code the same elements repeatedly.
- Swift Design Updates: Unlike traditional brand guidelines or UI libraries, design systems offer more flexibility for updating designs. Changes can be made to a source file that updates all instances of a component simultaneously.
- Improved Code and Performance: Design systems help developers maintain a single view of all the code, reducing the potential for duplicated code and messy code, that can hinder website performance.
- More Consistent UX: Consistent application of a design system’s components and layout, leads to a more predictable and cohesive user experience across multiple devices and platforms.
- Stronger Visual Identity: A design system allows designers to break down designs into their smallest components and identify relationships among them. Ensuring a strong cohesive design and consistent application of that design across any platform, unquestionably contributes to a memorable visual identity for your brand.
In addition to providing guidelines for the visual and functional aspects of a product, a design system can also include documentation on how to use and implement those guidelines. This might include things such as code snippets, design templates, and user research insights.
The benefits of a design system are endless, so if you want to find out how design systems we’ve created can significantly help your business, just as they have with other organizations, get in touch with us.
