“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.

Bruno’s advanced workshop at FoF Portugal Meetup: ​“Learn how to master all the new and updated Figma tools and plugins to optimize your Design Systems building skills. This includes everything from components properties to variants, the new auto-layout, interactive components, slots components, and more.”

Earlier this year, Jeremy Dizon led the project to enhance the Lyft Product Language (LPL) Native component library. In this blog post, he talks about the strategy they’ve used, the reason behind incorporating lightweight user research, and some key learnings from this 6‑month long project. Sometimes creating a new version of each component is the right approach, and major updates to Figma features provide a good opportunity for this work.

Luis shares jumping-off points for starting a new design system in Figma.

Hatch Design Talks podcast interviews Julia Kestner, Manager Designer Advocate at Figma. With Figma being in the hypergrowth phase and expanding in Europe, her job comes with exciting new challenges. The host spoke with Julia about the role of the Designer Advocate, the dangers of becoming too precious with one’s design system, and what we can expect now that Figma is putting more resources in Europe.

Luis Ouriach walks through updates to the design system structure recommended by Figma Advocates.

Lingo provides an easy-to-use visual hub for your Figma assets.

USWDS is an open-source design system for building accessible and mobile-friendly government websites. There is no official support for Figma yet, so Patrick Morgan added the color library to the Community and explained why he settled on this design system for his projects.

A new three-part video series with DesignOps Assembly to dive into what DesignOps is, the signs to further invest in it, and insider knowledge on how to effectively scale the practice. In this first session, Taylor Oliva, Head of DesignOps at Instacart, and Adam Fry-Pierce, Head of DesignOps at Docusign, dive into how to determine when your company needs to build out DesignOps. 

Interesting talk by Zeplin​’s co-founder and Head of Product Berk Cebi on the evolution of design systems over the last 10 years, the role that design tools play in this process, and the unfortunate disconnect between our design components, code, and documentation. He suggests design tokens may be one of the potential solutions and shows how they can be used to connect the parts of the design system.

A recording of a big workshop from the Friends of Figma Portugal meetup.