Three tips for value-adding design systems

Not every team needs an elaborate design system — many small teams over-invest, mistaking process for progress.

When systems are built without real projects using them, they often fail in practice, serving no real design needs.

The best design systems evolve naturally from real work across projects, not as busywork for idle designers or exercises in Figma mastery.

For a design system to add value, we have 3 recommendations.

1. A value-adding design system needs to be backed by real-world projects

A design system should be based on actual needs. The best way for a design system to grow is by the system being influenced by multiple real-world design projects.

We recommend a design system to form naturally over the course of projects. Focus on solving design problems, not on reinventing components.

We don’t recommend standalone design systems projects for most companies and organisations.

2. Lean into a development framework

Build your system in collaboration with developers, not in isolation.

For smaller teams, it helps to specify a specific UI framework (e.g. Material UI, shadcn/ui, Base UI...) and reference that UI framework as the backbone of your work.

For designer in teams with developers building with shadcn, our shadcn/ui kit is the perfect foundation for building your design system. 

3. The right complexity at the right time

Strip complexity down to what’s essential and implement only what your team truly needs.

In general, strive to keep things simple and only add complexity when it's really needed.

We see teams building multi-tier token systems, relying on external plugins like Token Studio that have little value add. They start creating custom flows to get the tokens to development , when in reality, the tokens rarely change.