Design systems: the unsung hero of team efficiency

Truthfully, design systems are frequently unrecognized for their hard work and dedication. Their job isn’t cool (or sexy), yet they are an absolute workhorse. The building blocks in a design system help create a shared language for teams and ensure a consistent experience for the user.

Without design systems, no matter the scale, there would be a lot of uncertainty in the design process. This could mean that even the most straightforward problems for your team may go awry. The standards created by design systems allow teams to work more efficiently and process the complex issues of designing a digital product in a streamlined manner.

The number of ways one might customize a design system is seemingly endless. The depth and breadth of granularity for a large corporate team might not be right for a small and mighty team of five. What they do have in common is that they will all contain some collection of the following (non-exhaustive) list: technical specs, design tokens, templates, layouts, color palettes, iconography…the list goes on.

To gather inspo for our own design system, we started a collection of cool and intelligent design systems we’ve seen recently. Check it out on Dropmark and let us know if you have any that we should add!