The team at Figma talked to several industry experts from Google’s Material Design team, Spotify, Shopify, and Stripe about how they’re managing the future of design systems — from tooling to automation to accessibility. 

A guide to using Tokens Studio to create flexible component libraries: ​“In headless design systems, the visual representation of components decouples from the logic required for their creation. Your building blocks gain UI after you apply tokens to them.”

I believe eventually starting work on top of a standard headless library will be normalized, similar to standard libraries in programming languages. How many times do we have to recreate all states of a button or create modals from scratch?

A deep dive by one of Tinder’s software engineers into the process of building their design system. The team started by defining design tokens in Figma using the Tokens Studio plugin, then used the Style Dictionary framework to transform styling data from a single source of truth into platform-specific artifacts that can be consumed by their codebases. To support the future work of designers and engineers, they also created a comprehensive documentation site using Zeroheight.

For the final episode of this season of Building blocks, Figma Designer Advocate Chad Bergman and Product Manager Jacob Miller spend the entire hour answering burning design systems questions.

Dann Petty asks for the best Figma tips for setting up a design system, and there are lots of golden nuggets in the replies. One of my favorites is ​“to not over eagerly start the design system when you start a project”.

Matt Bailey attended Schema 2022 conference in London and shared his impressions. All of the talks are already available on YouTube, so check out Matt’s summaries to see if something piques your interest.

Molly Hellmuth shares common mistakes that many of her students make when building their first design system, from overusing component sets and styles to mismanaging icons and making every component public.

Recordings from all three Schema 2022 conferences are now available — London, Tokyo, and New York. (Virtual event streamed select talks from physical locations.) Some of the speaker decks are also available in the Community.

“Playing constant catch up, adding prop after prop to support and maintain too many cases? Break larger components into flexible subcomponents so that users can solve their unique problems themselves. We’ll show how to architect subcomponents, leverage Figma’s improving component features, embrace opportunities and challenges the approach creates for your system.”

“Component properties launched at Config earlier this year, but was over a year in the making. Essentially React properties for Figma components, ​“props” removes the guesswork out of your design system and better aligns design components with code. Join the tech leads of the project for a behind the scenes look into how the feature came together, the power it unlocks for your design system, and a look into some of the exciting updates we’ve made post launch.”

“Design systems are drivers of cultural change disguised as a component library — getting your org to commit to this change often requires influencing across all levels from designers to VPs. In doing so, you’ll rely on skills like communication and relationship building, in order to expand your system of allies. In this talk, I’ll share mistakes and lessons learned along the way and offer ideas to help you navigate the challenges of design systems buy-in and advocacy.”

“At Uber, we’ve built a cross-platform design system with hundreds of thousands of weekly Figma inserts and an accompanying super plugin. But like everyone, we started with only a few components and multiple one-off plugins. We’ve carefully matured our design system through data and heart. Yet it hasn’t been straightforward. There’s a constant tension between what designers and developers need and how we interpret data. These growing pains only seem to get worse the more a system evolves. In this session, we’ll show you that data and heart don’t have to be at odds as we share how we mature our design system and plugins. Through demos of AI-driven tooling, we’ll explore the role data can play in the future and help your team scale your system by balancing numbers with heart.”

“Designing and building mobile native design systems can be tough. Different devices, different languages, and different conventions can make it challenging to get started and stay consistent. In this talk, the DoorDash design system team will share what they have learned about navigating these challenges: their process, their past mistakes, and how they move forward when building the robust native component library that powers the #1 food delivery app.”

“Roadmaps are a valuable tool in the product development toolkit: they shape a body of work by clearly communicating the projects, priority, and scope required to complete that work. Unfortunately, not every design systems team has the luxury of being staffed like a product development team, with a dedicated PM to drive the roadmap. In this talk, I’ll share how our scrappy design systems team at Credit Karma co-created a design systems roadmap with our internal community to bring confidence, clarity and focus to our work.”

“Whether you’re building a design systems program from the ground up, evolving an existing charter, or joining an established team, the best way to build trust with your future consumers, team, and organization is a cross-disciplinary sentiment analysis. And, if done right, the output can become the perfect foundation for an initial set of goals to inform your roadmap. Building this trust early will ensure that you can build the system they want (by delivering the system they need).”

“As Design Systems grow and evolve, so does the complexity. With complexity comes the need for newer best practices and adoption of more rigorous controls of our system. What can we as designers learn from other disciplines best practices, and how can we adopt them to ensure that our design systems grow in the right way?”

Figma Product Manager Jacob Miller’s keynote at Schema Conference on navigating the increasing complexity of design systems and what we can learn from the world of code.

A popular thread on some of the key Figma features for use in a design system.

I’m excited to see more commercial design systems adopting design tokens. ​“Version 3.0 introduces new features that will boost designer and developer workflow: sync Figma Tokens with code, improved components Inspect panel, redesigned documentation, and Slot, Space, and Grid components.”

Carbon is IBM’s open-source design system for products and digital experiences. The Carbon kit for Figma contains all resources you need to get started.