Design Systems · November 28, 2024 · 12 min read
Design Systems at Scale: What Makes One Last
Building a design system isn't a sprint, it's a discipline. Here's what makes the difference between one that lasts and one that's abandoned.
By Olabisi Adigun
Three years ago, 'Design System' was the hottest buzzword in the industry. Every company, regardless of size, felt compelled to build one. Many of them ended up as a graveyard of abandoned Figma files and deprecated React libraries.
The Fallacy of the 'Finished' System
The most common failure mode we observe is treating a design system as a project with a finish line. A team is assembled, they spend three months building 50 components, they launch 'Version 1.0', and then the team is disbanded back to feature work. Within six months, the system is obsolete.
A design system is not a project; it is a product. And like any product, it needs dedicated maintainers, a roadmap, and a continuous feedback loop from its users (the developers and designers).
If your design system doesn't have a dedicated governance model, you don't have a design system. You just have a UI kit.
Flexibility vs. Consistency
The central tension in any design system is balancing strict consistency with the flexibility required to build innovative features. If a system is too strict, designers will rebel, detach instances, and create 'rogue' components. If it's too loose, you lose the benefits of having a system in the first place.
We've found success in adopting the 'Slot' or 'Composition' pattern. Instead of building a Card component with 25 different boolean props (hasImage, hasFooter, isDestructive), build a base Card container that accepts children. Let the feature teams compose the layout they need using foundational primitives.
The Future is Tokenized
The industry is rapidly moving toward Design Tokens as the definitive source of truth. By abstracting values into semantic tokens (e.g., color-background-danger instead of red-500), we bridge the gap between Figma and code. In our most successful implementations, a designer updating a token in Figma automatically triggers a PR in GitHub that updates the CSS variables across the entire application suite.
