Are you struggling to maintain your brand consistency? It can be due to the low efforts your team has inflicted on the website design. Or, it may be due to the fact that your team has overlooked the criteria of ‘Design Systems.’
Yes, the design system is one of the most underrated segments in the website designing process. If you need more clarity, check the protocols of a leading web design company and how it implements them.
Before responding to questions: Why Design system? How is it useful? Let’s understand the basics of a ‘Design System.’
What is the Design System?
Design systems are reusable components, guidelines, and principles that provide developers, designs, and all other responsible stakeholders with a shared idea for creating a consistent web design and digital products.
Don’t confuse it with the style guides of website design. A planned design system assists designers in making rational decisions. However, implementing a design system may vary depending on the maturity a company considers while applying design practice.
Thus, if you need more interactive guidelines and consistent styling within your team, it is crucial that your in-house team should adopt a quality design system. Most importantly, if you are working on the UI/UX of your page, you cannot shadow out the advantages of a design system.
One of the prominent instances of a fair design system includes Microsoft’s Fluent Design system. It is a set of UI components and UX frameworks that offers features like sharing code, combining design approaches, and supporting interactivity. With this design system, you can create a consistent experience across iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows.
What to Include in a Design System?
An experienced web design company always prioritizes what to add to every design system. Here are the elements that you should add.
- Accessibility Protocols– Make sure that your design system is accessible as per the Web Content Accessibility guidelines.
- Design Principles– These are the rules that will be the foundation for the involved designers, consistency of branding, use of colors and contrast, optimal placement of CTAs, etc. The design principles reflect the business values of the client’s brand.
- Component Library– These are UI-based components such as buttons. It will allow the team to build consistent UI panels.
- Spacing– Define how the spacing and padding will be. It will make the page or the screen less cluttered.
- Grids– Understanding the pattern of grids make it simpler to unify page layouts. You can mention the grid sizes, gutter, and responsive columns that can be used in your design system.
- Naming Standard– When a project involves a large team, it becomes difficult to remember the terms introduced by every other. So, maintaining a convention in the naming can maintain the workflow.
- Gestures– This is needed when designing for touch-based interfaces such as mobile, touchpads, and others. It will help the designers and developers to streamline the design.
- Coded Segments– Mentioning the frameworks and code snippets can help future developers and designers understand the backend operations.
- Color Contrast– Color is the most crucial element in website design. Add the color palette you want for the logo, products, and overall branding. This way, all the involved stakeholders can maintain brand consistency.
What are the Challenges Encountered while Creating a Design System?
Creating the perfect design system for your website or other digital product may be difficult. To overcome this, you should become familiar with the common challenges. Here are the following:
Testing Strategy Implementation
Testing is the prime segment in website development or design. It is mandatory to check whether the design and development are executed per business requirements. However, where all the team fails is to make a correct choice of testing strategy. You can choose from different tests, such as visual regression and unit tests, but making the correct target can be difficult.
Documentation
Structuring defined documentation is much needed in the design system. However, you need an eye for precision to frame detailed documentation like the content guidelines, anatomy, and behavior of components. Documenting a design requires much effort and time. Most agencies fail to maintain the parameters.
The Ownership
Assigning the ownership of the Design system should be made prior. Failing to do this can make all the efforts useless. While working with a small team, ownership may not be a problem, but it seems confusing for a large team.
Scaling to a New Version
As we have discussed, a design system is a set of protocols and reusable UI elements used by designers throughout the project or even for different tasks; you need to update whenever a change or modification is required. This leads to confusion for new team members joining the project.
How Design Systems can Boost Design Workflow
Although the Design System involves strict guidelines for designers, missing out on this crucial parameter can affect the workflow. A reliable web design company always prioritizes creating a structured design system so that their designers don’t have to do repetitive tasks such as creating new shapes for CTA buttons and choosing suitable color palettes.
Most importantly, it establishes synchronization within your team, helping the workflow. You can find different designing tools, such as Figma and XD, where designers can create a symbol or component for their digital product or website. These elements are reusable across different pages. All you have to do is customize it as per your business requirements.
Creating separate files for the component library ensures a smooth workflow. Creating components being a part of a design system helps reduce errors and makes it seamless to collaborate with new developers and designers. Thus, a design system does not only work for designers but also developers.
Working on a project may need frequent onboarding of new members. Documentation being a part of the design system helps maintain the project’s clarity. It clearly defines how things are planned and how the team should approach the project. This way, you can match the criteria of development and design implementation.
Final Thoughts
Maintaining consistency in a project can be difficult. It becomes much more challenging when it involves a large team. Thus, adopting a design system is mandatory. Its primary intent is to maintain a workflow within the team and in the development and designing process. When you know the direction, you get more clarity in your work. Isn’t it? To ensure that you boost the design workflow, add the most relevant element to your design system.
