How I fell in love with a Design System

The first butterflies in my stomach

The Design System said yes, flattered by the attention it was getting from this front-end developer. On the first date, the developer was full of questions - he wanted to know everything about the Design System! It had a big personality and wasn’t shy to talk about itself. The Design System told the developer that it was a digital guide to brand identity. In other words, a brand’s reference library, bringing together principles, visuals, and components of reusable code so that any type of digital interface, like a specialist application, e-commerce site or other company website, can be developed consistently. The Design System is a whole ecosystem aimed at designers and developers of digital products and services.

The longer the conversation went on, the more the developer saw the future in the Design System, with a world of new possibilities. This guide would enable him to manage design without a hiccup in his future projects. Make development easier. Reduce design debt, and technical debt too. The Design System offered a certain comfort, brought a stability in the long haul. The developer even imagined a whole range of connected projects he could keep adding to for his client, with all the color variables and font styles that would be passed on to future web components. His bond with the Design System grew stronger.
 

Our honeymoon phase

At the start of their story, everything was perfect. They were living on cloud nine together. The developer was delighted to discover how easy adaptation was with the Design System; for each new project, even if the technology was different, the Design System never failed him. It gave him solid support that allowed him to guarantee consistency between all digital materials and foster a coordinated omnichannel strategy. Whether the developer was working on a web project or a mobile app, nothing changed! He took his components from the same places with the right design. If he needed a title component, he just had to import it and that was it - job done! Consistency, reliability, and simplicity were the main strengths of the relationship.
 

Trouble in paradise

Everything went without a hitch until the day they decided to move in together. Their first fight broke out when they found out about each other’s bad habits. The developer was shocked to learn the cost of the Design System and all the attention it demanded. Behind its charming front full of promises to save you time and effort, it was actually a diva! While setting it up required time, refactoring the new components for the Design System took up even more. It was a big ask... Because yes, unfortunately, we had to go back over all of our files to replace the existing components with new ones imported with the help of our beloved Design System.   
 

In the end, we got married and lived happily ever after

Ours, like all love stories, had its ups and downs, but things looked up in the end! You have to learn to live together, and despite this initial nasty surprise on moving in, the Design System saved us previous time in the long-term. Because once we had gotten past this !!! stage, the hardest part was over, and the road ahead was clear. After all, the Design System enables us to make our project more stable and easier to maintain. If we ever want to change the design as trends evolve, we just need to update our variables and our components, and it’s sorted! The project will be updated automatically.

The developer has also confided that the Design System’s lack of jealousy is not the least of its good qualities; it adapts to any project. And that’s how they became inseparable!
 

As soon as they met, the developer knew instinctively that he couldn’t continue to carry out projects without being joined with the Design System for life. And as a certain scribe said in Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra: "when you have the taste for something, the taste for the thing well done, the right techniques, sometimes you don’t find the person opposite you, the mirror I would say, that helps you to progress” [translator’s own translation], and now the developer can say that he has found his mirror, his other half. So YES, you need to make concessions and put in effort at the start, but since their romance smoothed out, they have been moving forward hand-in-hand, from project to project and client to client. They share the same vision for the future; the Design System embodies current design trends while also carrying future changes within itself. Every developer should be able to experience this harmonious relationship, so the one in this story has only one piece of advice for you; don’t think twice about marrying the Design System, it’s a union you won’t regret!