From the course: Hands-On with Design Systems

What is a design system?

From the course: Hands-On with Design Systems

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What is a design system?

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- [Instructor] What is a design system? A design system is a collection of reusable components, styles, and standards that defines a cohesive visual language that can be combined in numerous patterns used to create a digital product. Why are design systems so important? Design systems allow teams to replicate and scale quickly. It creates a unified language with cross-functional teams. Design system standards create consistency across products, channels, and teams. They provide visual consistency across the UI. Design systems are educational and reference tools for new team members, and design systems are great for customer retention and reduce support costs. Now let's talk about design system myths and misconceptions. Myth one, design systems are too limiting. On one hand, design systems should be rigid to execute consistency, but they should also provide flexibility for things like themeing, typography, color, borders, et cetera. So in other words, the design system should allow the ability to customize the look and the feel. Myth number two, a design system is just a style guide. This is a common misconception. A style guide and component library can influence a design system, but a complete design system contains many more features like design tokens, content guidelines, rules and principles, UI kits, code components, just to name a few. Myth number three, design systems are one and done. Design systems should not change every other day, but they should be evergreen and flexible to improve and evolve with the user's behavior. The advantage of having a design system is their ability to be enhanced over time, and if you build it with a solid foundation of reusable components and well-defined guidelines, the process of updating and enhancing can be done with minimal effort and optimal speed. Now, we discussed design systems, what and why, and we went through some of the popular misconceptions. In the next section, I'll introduce to you the different types of design system models, so you can choose the right model for you, your team, and your company's needs.

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