How Designers Can Build Design Systems That Sustain More Design Systems

At Innovatemap, our team of four product designers works on 18 to 20 client products at any given time. These products range from B2C to B2B to B2B2C, and from startups to multinational corporations. But within this range, each project needs a design system in order for us to work consistently & efficiently. Depending on the project, the client type, and the stage of their digital product, the system we create and use is slightly different. Every system, however, needs to include opportunities for flexibility and account for scalability while representing the needs of the product and allowing designers to operate with an exploratory mindset.

Inspired by this challenge, our product design team developed two frameworks to support how we create design systems for clients. First, we built Design Encyclopedia, an atomic design framework that contains more than 1000 design components representing all UI elements a product design team might need. Then, we developed and released UX Friday for Figma Community, a collection of common atoms and molecules that designers can use to kickstart and scale a new design system. UX Friday gives designers a toolkit to begin designing their system today; it removes the burden & delay of defining which elements to use.

Using the above frameworks revealed how we can guide clients to create more efficient and optimized design systems of their own. Doing so has accelerated how the Innovatemap design team creates solutions for clients. We can collaborate faster and are more equipped to teach our clients’ design teams a better way of building their products.

For Config 2022, we want to share our process of creating these frameworks. We will discuss the decisions and techniques that we used during the creation process and how it supports the projects we work on. In our talk, we will explain how you can improve your design systems using lessons from the supporting frameworks we developed.