Design, UI, UX, Inspiration

Top 6 Design System Examples to Learn From and Improve Your Own

By Sandra Boicheva
February 3rd, 2022

If you have a growing scaling design team or a big range of products, features, and components you need to maintain, you might need a design system to make your life easier. This is why today we’ll discuss the benefits of using a design system also have a look at the top 5 most popular and proven to be successful design system examples.

Design System Examples: Article Overview
What Defines a Design System?
Benefits of Using a Design System
How to Adopt a Design System?
Top 6 Design Systems

Simple Design System by Daria Stodola

What Defines a Design System?

A design system refers to a set of standards, guidelines, practices, and patterns that group all elements for the creative team to design, implement and develop. Companies create design systems to provide consistency in stying and interaction guidelines for all product teams, including designers, programmers, product managers, etc. This way everyone who works on the product is on the same page. It’s important to note that design systems are not style guides or pattern libraries, as they are a more broad and high-reach strategic plan that contains these style guides and pattern libraries. They also evolve with the tools, new technologies, and the product itself. Think of your design system as your own collection of Lego blocks that you have at your disposal before starting to build something.

In short, design systems may have the following components:

Interaction guidelines
Component libraries
Pattern libraries
Styleguide of approved brand colors, shapes, and fonts and when to use them
Grid systems for consistent layouts
Content guidelines
A specific list of icons
Rules for object placement
List of standard elements for interfaces
Illustrations
Design principles
Data visualizations
Voice and tone

,etc.

Ideally, these different components are often reusable elements for designers to work within a prototyping tool or actual lines of code for developers to put into the interface.

There are three key principles that all efficient design systems have in common. The first is the ability to scale systematically. Second, any system needs to provide the ability for collaboration and maintenance in real-time. Last, it has to be flexible enough to use in an agile way, allowing for product evolution.

Benefits of Using a Design System

Developing a design system with a single source of visual references, tools, guides, patterns, and libraries keeps the entire team’s work consistent and has each member on the same page. This itself brings a lot of advantages:

Consistency

Design systems help teams deliver consistent design and user experience in four different ways.

First, we have the visual consistency that relates to elements and components with similar visual properties such as colors, sizes, fonts, space, grids, positions.

Second, it’s the functional consistency patterns that relate to the expected behaviors of UX interactions within the product. This creates the predictability that leads to the desirable intuitive experience.

And last, the internal consistency between different parts of the interface within the entire product, and external consistency that extends all of this across multiple independent applications, products, and systems. For example, Adobe products have external consistency. If you know Photoshop, you will be able to reuse your knowledge when you start working with Illustrator.

Faster Developing Process

Another huge benefit of using design systems is reducing the building time in the long run. Of course, building a design system in the first place takes a lot of time and resources. However, this is an investment towards long-term benefits. Once the system is in place, your team won’t need to build every component, its various states, and properties from scratch. All team members will have the full documentation with components, specifications, and guidelines at their disposal. They will be able to quickly put the elements together for each new project.

In short, you won’t need to come up with new ways to answer old problems.

Organized Assets and Clean Code

Without a design system, teams build components and solutions for each particular case and cover short-term issues. In the long run, this will result in unused components or ones that may get obsolete over time. Developing a unified design system for general components that would work across different applications instead, will allow designers and developers to reuse these elements in different environments. A well-built design system with good documentation should organize the assets, making them easy to maintain and giving a clean codebase.

Room for Creativity

While having a design system eliminates the need to create design elements from scratch, it gives the teams more potential for creativity and innovation. The base is there, allowing you to invest more time and freedom to bring the project to the next level.

How to Adopt a Design System?

You can approach using a design system in three general ways: to adopt, to adapt, and to create a custom one.

Using an existing open-source design system is fast to implement and the lowest cost approach. However, it has less customization and low brand differentiation. On the contrary, creating an entirely new one will take more resources to implement. This generally depends on your company’s needs.

Keep in mind that in order to create your own custom design system, it takes a lot of time to set up and structure. You will need to employ systems thinking and design thinking to make sure that users will understand how to work with it and maintain it.

Of course, there goes also the question of complexity depending on how you want to build your design system and maintain it.

There are three options as well:

Design File with reusable Components: The easiest way is to catalog your elements in a Figma or Sketch library and export PDF or other documentation to keep a record. It’s simple and straightforward. The downside is you can’t include code and it’s difficult to maintain. There’s the possibility to end up with more copies of the same static documentation that conflict with one another.
Third-Party Tool: Tools such as InVision DSM go a step further and allow you to manage and organize your components and make it easy to share across users and systems. With this option, you can keep working design files, code, and descriptions. The downside is, you’re relying on the tool, its features, and a third party for maintenance.
Custom System Documentation: With this option, you make your design system as complex as you want it to be and share code. The downside is it takes a lot of effort to develop and you’ll also need someone to keep it updated.

Design System Examples

Now we’re going to look at some of the best design system examples out there for the purpose of inspiration. There’s something you can learn from any of the examples and get inspired to create your own that best suits your company’s needs.

1. Atlassian Design System

Atlassian creates collaboration and project management tools such as Trello and Jira for creative teams all over the world. The platform focuses on agile tools that will help teams plan, develop, keep track and deliver great products.