This is a brain dump with minimal editing or proofreading — on what I learned from my design team at a startup. More updates coming soon…
Treat it as a product
- Treat design system as a product as itself, with a dedicated product team consists of designers who owns one or multiple components and can elaborate how they will be used to their engineers.
- As a product, it will iterate throughout time. When first released our product MVP, we released out first design system. The team intentionally called it design system 1.0, since we know it will evolve and grow bigger in upcoming releases.
Start at the atomic level
As we get started to build the design system — start with the foundation layer: Type, layout, spacing…
Communication & Documentation
Set dedicated time to communicate with the team — document where each component will be used, their goals, purposes, attributes and anatomy. As an example (The best documentation I can find) is from Google Material Design
