What is a design system

[KevinMind]

TBD

[craigcook]

A common element in various attempts to define "design system" is "establishing a standard for consistent reuse."

Beyond that, a design system can encompass a lot of things at a lot of scales. It could be as small and basic as defining a single color variable on a single page, or as big and complex as reams of docs and hundreds of components across thousands of products... as soon as you set a standard and reuse it to achieve consistency, you're thinking in systems baby!

[TGiles]

"The purpose of a system is what it does," right? So a design system should allow people to work faster and more effectively by having a set of standards/guidelines/components, so that people can spend time solving the new problems instead of re-solving known problems. This allows us to address complaints from the people using our stuff faster and more effectively by knowing that we (probably) already have a tool for the job.

[cmkm]

My mental model of design systems is of building blocks, like lego: there are various shapes and sizes of blocks, and some standard ways of putting those blocks together (following the instructions), but sometimes there's a need to build something new with those blocks. And maybe sometimes we realize we need to add a frog.