
Are design systems overrated?
How many of you are using it in your company?
Talking product sense with Ridhi
9 min AI interview5 questions

In my experience a proper design system increases productivity

Thanks for the reply. May I know in what kind of projects you have used design system ? Or can you mention your company name so that I will get an idea

In mobile app the content of the app doesnβt matter. If the design system is well defined I can use those design token and itβs just plug and play for things like fonts, spacing, themes. It makes it easy to change the theme of the entire app by just modifying the files where colors are defined. Similarly it is easy to make modifications that reflect app wide

They are necessary to save time and keep things streamlined. It will only make your work easier.

Necessary? I don't think so, it depends upon the scope of the project right? I'm talking from a designer's perspective.... Sometimes building a DS is time consuming. For developers..yes it helps a lot

I agree with you! For small projects like landing pages and stuff it is not really necessary. I'm a designer too and when you start working on designing a product ( that you're gonna keep working on for a long time) it's really time saving right??

Yes.. they are bit overrated these days. This is coming who has built 3 Design systems for small, medium and working in big team.
Tho I have special niche in Design system. I donβt recommend much to early stage designers.
It more about managerial and governance skills, less about design skills.
Stick to core problem solving as much as you can. It def can be bonus advantage in resume but nothing concrete.
With new AI and automation, this will the first thing that will vanish from design.
I am currently consulting a startup which can a basic level DS in just few clicks with code π
Killing my own with my own hands ππ

Oh God π. Which company is that? Can u share the website link?

Figrrr

They are not overrated. They are good to have. It's the refusal of some devs to stick to it is what causes issues and gives them a bad name

Are u a developer or a designer?

Dev, now architect

In a small team trying to find PMF, where the product itself isn't stable, design systems is not necessary. But as you grow and become more complex, they become a necessity

Agreed to your first point.

For the second point, when you reach a level where multiple designers are trying to stretch the app with their own creativity, you need a common language for both design and development in order to scale better.

Small MVP is ready, far from something I visioned

Are you designing a DS for that? π

No, DS for that ππ

average landing page designer ?
i work at a series b startup, just about 2 yoe now. we have 3x B2B applications and the previous designer had fucked up the entire design files and documentation with different components all over the place.
i tried brushing it off and not making an effort for a couple months and it just become too complex to handle with multiple feature implementations coming in.
finally took an entire month to compile all possible flows and really just creating a ds, separate for all applications- made my work so much easier, and the components are even uniform in style and interactions so our users always feel comfortable and within knowledge of use. thats why ds are important.
what i understood is- at some point, you'll want to have keep things Lego style and plug and play. and when there's something new, just build using existing blocks!

Thanks for sharing your experience. How do you start creating a design system? Do you build from scratch or take any well designed existing design system and alter it as per your needs?
and why did you asked "average landing page designer?" Didn't get you

just plain old atomic design. create a map of user flows, keep track of recurring components, create atoms and molecules, use them to create the organism components used in the applications. i took dedicated time off the week to rebuild each flow, adding to the ds. even sat with devs to help them create the components. its still a wip, but definitely sped up work, + easier development for front-end even.

Nah, they're not over rated. As long as it's not over done, a DS can help give a level of consistency across your products. It's very helpful for complex products and companies with multiple products as well. But the key is to define just the baseline but still let the designers of each product have some level of creativity.

π

For a second I thought you were talking about system design.

Nah bruhπ

If anything they are underrated in real job.