Design systems to promote unity within your organisation

Where the idea came from

In the early days of design systems, their origins can be traced back to the influence of print media, where print design standards and brand manuals historically provided consistent visual guidelines for logos, typography, and colour. These print media frameworks laid the groundwork for systematic design thinking.

Christopher Alexander, through his pioneering work on pattern language in architecture—especially his book ‘, A Pattern Language introduced the idea of interconnected patterns that could be reused across projects. The concept of reusable patterns and shared mental frameworks became foundational to modern design systems, establishing a common language and strategic approach for teams. Alexander’s insights into pattern language inspired early thinking about design as a collection of reusable components, a principle that would later influence software development and UI design.

As digital products emerged, the challenge shifted to applying these ideas in fast-moving, complex environments. In these early days, the emergence of the design pattern library and user interface library, such as the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), provided foundational resources for consistent UI component development. Early attempts to reuse design elements and code hinted at the potential for systematic approaches, but the scale and speed of software development demanded new solutions.

The shift to digital products

UI kits and static style guides? They hit a wall pretty fast. Sure, you get some components and a few rules, but when your product starts sprawling across teams and channels, these tools show their age. They can't keep up. Your brand starts looking patchy, your user experience gets messy, and you're left playing catch-up with inconsistencies that multiply faster than you can fix them.

Here's what actually works: proper design systems. Not the half-hearted kind, but the real deal with solid guidelines, rock-solid resources, documentation that doesn't make people cry, and components you can actually reuse without breaking things. You document your patterns, you apply them systematically, and suddenly you've got consistency that scales. It's not magic – it's just doing the work properly from the start.

Design system foundations

A design system isn’t just a bunch of assets sitting in a folder, it’s a solid framework that helps design and dev teams build digital products that actually work together. It establishes a consistent visual language and core design principles that guide the look and feel of all digital products. This includes typography, colour palettes, iconography, and spacing, which together create a visually cohesive experience that strengthens brand identity. Clear design principles help teams make informed decisions, ensuring every UI element aligns with the brand’s values and user needs.

"A style guide is an artifact of design process. A design system is a living, funded product with a roadmap & backlog, serving an ecosystem.” Nathan Curtis, Center Centre

At its heart, a good design system acts as your single source of truth, pulling together component libraries, pattern libraries, style guides, and a clear design language. These core pieces give you reusable components and proper documentation, which cuts out the busy work and stops teams from building the same thing twice. Design system documentation plays a crucial role here, providing structured, accessible guidelines and resources that help teams design consistent user interfaces and follow best practices across platforms.

In Sparkbox’s 2022 survey, 95% of respondents said their design system includes components, and 85% said it includes component documentation. - Sparkbox, The 2022 Design Systems Survey

When you set up a system that makes your visual and functional standards clear, different teams can actually work together without the usual headaches. Dev teams get components they can trust and understand, while designers can focus on solving real problems instead of rebuilding buttons for the hundredth time. This approach doesn’t just speed things up, it makes sure every digital product feels like it belongs to your brand and identity and does what users expect. Get your design system right, and you’ll work more efficiently, keep everyone aligned, and build products that can grow without falling apart.

How different stakeholders use a design system

A design system serves various roles depending on the stakeholder, ensuring alignment and efficiency across the entire product lifecycle.

Designers

Designers rely on a design system to maintain visual consistency and streamline their workflow. The system provides them with a library of reusable components, clear design guidelines, and a unified language that helps ensure every element aligns with the brand’s identity and user experience goals. By leveraging a design system, designers can focus more on solving complex UX problems and less on recreating basic UI elements, allowing for faster iteration and higher-quality designs. It also helps them seamlessly switch between different themes or platforms without losing coherence.

“Designers want to focus their time on solving the problems unique to their product, instead of spending time reinventing the wheel.” - Barnardo’s design system, quoted by Amy Hupe

Developers

Modern design systems include code snippets and component libraries that bridge the gap between design and development teams. These resources provide developers with ready-to-use, tested UI components, reducing guesswork and speeding up implementation. This integration ensures that designs are faithfully translated into functional interfaces, improving collaboration and reducing errors. Developers benefit from consistent components and clear documentation that help maintain code quality and accelerate the development process.

“Rather than focusing on pixels, developers can focus on application logic, while designers can focus on user experience, interactions, and flows.” - Salesforce Trailhead, Lightning Design System

Product Managers

Product managers use design systems to align cross-functional teams (groups composed of members from different departments or areas of expertise within an organisation) around shared goals and expectations. The system offers a clear framework for prioritising features and ensures that design and development efforts contribute to a cohesive user experience. By referencing the design system, product managers can better communicate requirements, track progress, and make informed decisions that balance user needs, technical feasibility, and business objectives.

Stakeholders and Executives

For stakeholders and executives, a design system provides visibility into the design and development process, enabling better oversight and strategic planning. It serves as a single source of truth that demonstrates how consistent branding and user experience are maintained across products, reducing risks associated with fragmented design efforts. By investing in and supporting a robust design system, leadership can drive efficiency, cost savings, and faster time to market, ultimately contributing to stronger brand equity and customer satisfaction.

Content Strategists and Writers

Content strategists and writers use design system guidelines to ensure that tone of voice, language style, and content structure align with the brand’s identity and user experience goals. Clear documentation helps them create consistent messaging across digital products, reinforcing the overall brand experience.

Quality Assurance (QA) Teams

QA teams refer to the design system to verify that UI elements and interactions meet the defined standards, ensuring consistency and reducing bugs related to visual or functional discrepancies. The system acts as a benchmark for quality and usability across products.

Marketing Teams

Marketing teams leverage design systems to maintain brand consistency across campaigns and digital touchpoints. By aligning marketing materials visually and thematically with product interfaces, they help create a cohesive brand presence that resonates with users.

Onboarding and Training Coordinators

Design systems serve as educational resources that help onboard new team members quickly by providing a clear understanding of design principles, components, and workflows. This accelerates ramp-up time and ensures that new hires contribute effectively to design and development efforts.

Material design and other inspirations

Google’s Material Design gets it right. It’s a solid design system that gives you guidelines, components, and the building blocks you need to keep things consistent. No guesswork. No reinventing the wheel every time. It works so well that plenty of other companies have borrowed its approach, and that’s smart.

“Google’s Material Design set a new standard by combining comprehensive design guidelines with coded components, enabling teams to create consistent and scalable digital experiences.” — Google Material Design, Material.io

Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. and Microsoft’s Fluent Design do the same job, just with their own flavour. Different companies have unique requirements and contexts, which influence how they implement design systems, typography, and terminology. Study them. Learn what makes them tick. Take the good bits and use them in your own work. The secret sauce is design tokens, those standardised variables that control colours, spacing, and fonts. They’re simple but powerful. Set them up once, and your whole team can move fast while keeping everything looking like it belongs together. No more design drift. No more “close enough” compromise

The role of design tokens

Design tokens are the backbone of modern design systems, acting as named variables that store core design attributes such as colours, typography, and spacing.

$bg-dark: $colour-neutral-20;
$bg-light: $colour-neutral-90;
$text-size-body: $font-size-m;
$text-size-micro: $font-size-s;
$space-inset-base: 16px;
$space-stack-large: 32px;

"Design tokens and styling hooks are visual design ‘atoms’… named entities that store visual design attributes." Salesforce Developers

They enable teams to create consistent visual elements across different platforms and devices, all based on a set of unified variables. Tokens simplify updates by allowing changes to propagate automatically throughout the system.

In Sparkbox’s 2022 survey, 69% of respondents said their design system includes design tokens. - Sparkbox, The 2022 Design Systems Survey

When Google's material design went mainstream

Breakthrough moments helped bring design systems into the mainstream. Yahoo!’s Pattern Library in 2006 was a pivotal moment that sparked mainstream interest in design systems, serving as an early public effort to organise reusable UI patterns systematically.

Google’s Material Design in 2014 marked a significant milestone, introducing a comprehensive design language that combined visual guidelines with coded components, setting a new standard for digital design systems.

At scale, public-sector projects like GOV.UK demonstrated how design systems could unify diverse teams and products under a single, accessible framework, proving their value beyond commercial applications.

"The GOV.UK Design System helps teams that work on government services follow the Government Design Principles and GOV.UK Service Manual." GOV.UK Design System

The rise of open source design systems and platforms like the Figma Community have made these resources more accessible, enabling teams to collaborate, adopt, and scale consistent design practices efficiently.

What changed for teams after this point

These developments revolutionised how teams approach design. Design systems evolved from mere collections of components and style guides into powerful tools that supercharge collaboration between design and engineering teams. By creating a unified language that bridges disciplines, they cut through confusion and streamline workflows like never before. Packed with reusable components, clever design tokens, core principles, and detailed documentation, design systems empower teams to effortlessly switch between platforms or themes without reinventing the wheel. This not only guarantees consistency and efficiency but also steers product design towards seamless, cohesive user interfaces that uphold brand integrity every step of the way.

“Homebase connects product management, design, and engineering through a shared language that describes the digital products we make at Wayfair.” - Wayfair

Here's where most teams stumble: designers and developers working in silos, then wondering why nothing fits together. Skip the drama. Get them in the same room from day one. Build your component libraries and pattern libraries together, not separately. Your style guide isn't decoration—it's the rulebook that stops arguments about whether that button should be 8px or 10px padding. Every decision about type, colour, spacing, and icons needs to be documented. Otherwise, you're just creating organized chaos.

Design tokens are your secret weapon, though most people use them wrong. They're not just fancy variables—they're the difference between updating your entire colour scheme in five minutes or spending three weeks hunting down every hex code. Want to support light and dark modes without losing your mind? Tokens make it trivial. Want to rebrand without a complete rebuild? Tokens again.

A solid design system saves time, cuts waste, and stops your users from feeling like they're using five different products. Look at Material Design—Google didn't build it to show off. They built it because scattered, inconsistent interfaces cost real money and frustrate real people. Your design system should be the single source of truth that settles arguments, aligns your team, and makes your brand feel intentional instead of accidental.

Cross-functional teams collaboration

Design systems foster better collaboration among cross-functional teams by providing a shared language and resources. Designers, developers, product managers, and other stakeholders can work from the same playbook, reducing misunderstandings and improving efficiency. This alignment accelerates decision-making and helps deliver a unified user experience.

Governance and Maintenance

As design systems grow, governance becomes essential. Establishing clear roles for who approves new components, maintains documentation, and manages updates helps keep the system reliable and flexible. Ongoing maintenance ensures the design system evolves with the product and continues to meet team needs without becoming outdated or cumbersome.

Sparkbox found that only 44% of teams reported having a governance model or sharing a design system roadmap - Sparkbox, The 2022 Design Systems Survey

"It wasn’t hard to get them to follow the guidelines, it was hard to get them to agree on the guidelines." Lori Kaplan, Atlassian (via Design Systems Handbook, InVision)

Best practices for implementation

Getting a design system to actually work takes a bit of sense and a lot of patience. Here's what works: start small. Pick one thing—maybe your button library, maybe your basic patterns—and get it right before you go mad trying to fix everything at once. Your teams need wins, not overwhelming to-do lists. Build momentum, listen to what people actually say (not what they think they should say), and sort your process as you go.

You can't build this thing in a corner. Get your designers, developers, and product folk talking from day one. Everyone needs skin in the game, or you'll end up with something that looks pretty but doesn't work, or works brilliantly but nobody uses. When people help build it, they'll actually champion it. When they don't, well, good luck with that.

Documentation isn't glamorous, but it's everything. Write it like you're explaining to your colleague, not like you're trying to win a corporate writing award. Code snippets, clear examples, the real stuff people need when they're stuck at 4pm on a Friday. And yes, you'll need to talk to people face-to-face sometimes. Training sessions work. Conversations work. Hoping people will figure it out on their own? That doesn't work.

Sparkbox found that only 30% of teams reported having support, training, and onboarding for their design system, but “successful” systems had these in place 76% of the time. - Sparkbox, The 2022 Design Systems Survey

Here's the bit most people get wrong: your design system isn't a monument. It's a living thing. Trends shift, users change their minds, businesses pivot. If you're not updating and reviewing regularly, you're building tomorrow's technical debt. Flexibility isn't weakness—it's survival.

Look at what Atlassian and Salesforce actually did. They didn't create perfect systems overnight. They built smart, stayed practical, and kept iterating. The result? Teams that work better together, faster development, and experiences that don't make users want to throw their laptops out the window. Follow their lead: be structured, but not rigid. Be inclusive, but not democratic about everything. Be adaptable, because the alternative is obsolescence.

Overcoming implementation challenges

Rolling out a design system? It's messy. Especially when you've got multiple products or teams scattered everywhere. The biggest headache is keeping everyone on the same page. Here's what works: get one team to own the whole thing. Make them responsible for the system's evolution. No exceptions. Everyone else follows their lead.

Getting stakeholders on board can be a pain. Don't dance around it. Show them the real benefits—faster work, less wasted effort, a brand that doesn't look like it was designed by committee. Bring them into the process early. Ask for their input. When people feel like they own something, they actually care about it.

Technical integration is where things get tricky. Your new design system needs to play nice with existing software and workflows. Work closely with your dev teams—they're not the enemy. Use design tokens and modular components. Makes updates simpler and stops everything from breaking when you change one button.

Learn from others who've been through this mess. Airbnb and Uber built their own systems and lived to tell about it. Open source options like Material Design give you a solid starting point without reinventing the wheel. Know the pitfalls before you hit them. Do this right and you'll get efficiency, better teamwork, and users who actually enjoy what you build.

That is the difference between a team that moves with confidence, and a team that keeps second-guessing spacing, states, and component behaviour.

Most teams already understand what a design system should contain. Sparkbox’s 2022 survey found 95% include components, 85% include component documentation, and 69% include design tokens. 

But the same survey shows where things often fall apart. Only 44% reported having a roadmap or a process for deciding what gets added, updated, or removed. Only 30% reported having onboarding for new subscribers or contributors.

So you end up with a library that exists, but doesn’t scale.

The clearest proof comes from teams that measured outcomes after rollout. IBM’s Commerce Platform team moved their checkout flow onto Carbon and reported a 5% increase in conversion rate. 

IBM Cloud also shared a brutal, practical metric: they estimated saving 2,000 hours per pattern, making teams 80% more efficient than designing or coding screens from scratch. 

And in the public sector, Triad built a Common User Interface aligned to GOV.UK Design System principles and said it saved each project team around six weeks of development time.

These numbers only show up when the system behaves like a product. Someone owns it. People can learn it quickly. Decisions stay visible. The system evolves as the work evolves.

Want a simple gut check?

If you paused all new feature work for two weeks, would your team use that time to build one shared set of components, or would they keep polishing one-offs?

Is it time for your own design system?

If your teams struggle with inconsistent UI, duplicated work, or slow iterations, it may be time to consider a robust design system.

Ask yourself: Are design decisions duplicated across teams? Is onboarding new members slow and inefficient? Are product updates inconsistent or costly across platforms?

Answering yes to these questions signals that ad-hoc approaches have been outgrown and a strategic investment in a design system is warranted.

Design systems are not mere assets or libraries; they are critical infrastructure for scalable, consistent digital products. Ignoring their value risks ongoing inefficiency, higher costs, and fragmented user experiences.

The next step is to assess your current design process, align stakeholders on goals, and plan governance and tooling to build a sustainable design system that empowers your teams and users alike.

Is your product starting to feel like it was built by different teams who never spoke?

That’s usually the moment a design system stops being “nice to have” and becomes urgent.

If you want a design system that your team actually uses, get in touch.

We’ll help you:

• audit what you have now
• define the principles and guardrails that stop design drift
• build a component library and tokens your developers can ship with confidence
• set up governance so it stays useful

Book a call and we’ll tell you, straight, whether you need a design system, a clean-up, or something simpler.