5 tips to know before building a design system

Question

Creating a design system is a big step toward scaling design and development efficiently. Here are 5 key tips to know before you start building one:

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1. Define the Purpose and Scope First

Before jumping into components or tokens, clarify why you're building a design system. Are you solving consistency issues? Speeding up dev cycles? Supporting multiple products?
Define:

• Primary users (designers, devs, PMs)
• Supported platforms (web, mobile, etc.)
• Short-term and long-term goals

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2. Build a Strong Foundation with Design Tokens

Design tokens (colors, typography, spacing, etc.) are the core of your system's consistency. Start by establishing:

• A naming convention (e.g., color-primary, spacing-sm)
• Token hierarchy (global vs. component-specific)
• How tokens will be consumed by code (via CSS variables, JSON, etc.)

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3. Start Small and Scale

Don’t try to build everything at once. Focus on core components first—buttons, inputs, modals—then expand.
Use real product needs to drive what gets added. Avoid "just in case" components.

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4. Collaborate Early with Developers

A successful design system is not just a design asset—it's a living product used by teams. Involve engineers from the start to:

• Align on tech stack (e.g., React, Vue, Web Components)
• Ensure components are accessible, performant, and maintainable
• Avoid a “design-only” system no one uses

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5. Document Everything Clearly

Adoption depends on clear, centralized documentation. Include:

• Guidelines (how and when to use components)
• Code snippets or package install instructions
• Do/Don’t examples
• Contribution and update processes

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If you are using Angular, you can keep project Structure like this.

src/
├── app/
│   ├── core/        # Singleton services, guards, interceptors
│   ├── shared/      # Shared components, pipes, directives
│   ├── features/    # Feature modules (lazy-loaded)
│   └── design-system/  # Your component library (if building one)
├── assets/          # Images, icons, styles
├── environments/    # Env-specific settings

You can create a component library of your design system:

ng generate library ui-kit

For documenting UI components you can use Storybook:

npx sb init --type angular

Comments

Great tips—really appreciate how practical and actionable this was! Curious though, when scaling the system across multiple teams, how do you usually manage contributions without it becoming chaotic?

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To handle it across multiple teams, we need the right structures, boundaries, and tooling. Apart from it, we must have a modular architecture (micro-frontends or feature modules), define code ownership & boundaries, and have well-defined contracts & interfaces. Also, CI/CD with linting, testing, and static analysis plays a big role.