A cohesive system

This weekend, I read “Building a Visual Language” by Karri Saarinen, previously a principal designer at airbnb who contributed to the Airbnb’s design system, Cereal. As an aspiring product designer, I have been throughly intrigued by design systems. Consistency plays a big role in design and it seems like design systems is the remedy for everyone on a team to align to the same style. I used to think that design systems were very rigid, but after reading “a unified design language shouldn’t be just a set of static rules and individual atoms; it should be an evolving ecosystem” the quote reminded me of how a design system allows for deviation and it is almost like a living object that changes throughout time.

Personally, I do feel that design systems are integral to every tech company and is often overlooked in startup world. In my experience with startups, with the fast pace of nature of pushing out products, there is often an emphasis on designing quickly. With probably one or two designers on the team, it seems like there’s not really a need for building a library between 2 people. However, I think there should be a priority in creating the building blocks from the start. Reading this post, I noticed that it is slightly outdated as the Airbnb team has been using Sketch to create components. Recently, there have been better tools such as Figma tailored towards the needs of companies creating functional components that are iterative.

I find it pretty fascinating that large orgs have a dedicated team just to create the vision and keep all teams aligned with a Design Language system to unite engineers and designers together, while meeting business goals such as saving cost. This makes me excited about the future of design systems and has definitely spurred me to create one.