Toptal: Understanding Design Systems and Patterns
<aside> 🌱 A design system is a collection of documentation on principles and best practices, that helps guide a team to build digital products.
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Design systems bring order and consistency to digital products. They help to protect the brand, elevate the user experience, and increase the speed and efficiency of how we design and build products.
— Andrew Couldwell, Laying the Foundations
Design systems are time-saving and promote better design and easier development, leading to higher consistency in experience, code and brand. They set standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across different pages and channels.
Inconsistent user experiences lead to confused users. Design systems reduce replicated work and help to maintain a more trustworthy experience across a wide range of products. By creating standard components and workflows, we can create more predictable experiences for users as they move from one product to another.
<aside> 🔥 Overview: Introduction to design systems
The world of design systems is vast and guidance is constantly shifting as new technologies and schools of thought emerge. It can be difficult to know where to begin, even for experienced designers.
This course will walk you through the entire design system journey—from fundamental concepts, to building and documenting your system.
We’ll provide guidance, explore real-world applications, and give you tools to make meaningful decisions. We’ll also touch on Figma features like libraries, component properties, and styles.
Overview
Designers who are familiar with styles and components in Figma, but want to improve their workflows and broaden their skills to a systems-level.
Managers and leaders who want to learn how design systems can increase productivity and support design at scale.
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According to Emmet Connolly, director of product design at Intercom:
Most Design Systems are really just Pattern Libraries: a big box of UI Lego pieces that can be assembled in near-infinite ways. All the pieces may be consistent, but that doesn’t mean the assembled results will be. Your product is more than just a pile of reusable UI elements. It has structure and meaning. It’s not a generic web page, it’s the embodiment of a system of concepts.
And the author of **Atomic Design Methodology,** Brand Frost;
A kit of UI components without accompanying philosophy, principles, guidelines, processes, and documentation is like dumping a bunch of IKEA components on the floor and saying “Here, build a dresser!” The guidelines and documentation accompanying the components serve as the instruction manual that come with the IKEA components to help the user properly and successfully build furniture.