Design systems unify components, guidelines, and assets, enhancing collaboration between developers and designers for consistent user interfaces.
What is a “Design System”?
A design system’s main goal is to give developers and designers a common language and set of tools, which will help them work together and be more productive.
Design systems unite reusable components, guidelines, and assets, fostering collaboration between developers and designers. They ensure consistency and cohesion across platforms, acting as a shared toolkit for maintaining a unified design language throughout an organization. Teams can increase efficiency, prevent redundancy, and create adaptable designs seamlessly over time by utilizing a set of predefined components. Design systems are crucial for ensuring that the visual character and branding of a company remain consistent across all platforms and touchpoints.
What’s included in it?
Essential components of a design system include typography, color schemes, icons, grids, UI components, design styles, and layout principles. Furthermore, there are explicit instructions and documentation available to guide the utilization of these components. This detailed guidance makes sure that everything is the same and reduces the chance of mistakes or disagreements during the planning process.
Popular design methodologies used by developers and designers, such as atomic design, material design, and human-centered design, have gained acceptance among design professionals.
“Here’s the simple truth: you can’t innovate on products without first innovating the way you build them.”
―Alex Schleifer, Airbnb
Here are the top 7 design systems of 2024:
1. Material Design System
Leading the way in material design is Google, which provides a wealth of components, guidelines, and tools. Because of its open-source philosophy, Material Design enables teams to quickly produce visually stunning products.
The Material 3 Design Kit includes (Open figma kit) components and a comprehensive understanding of the Material Design framework.
2. Human Interface Guidelines
The Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) offer valuable advice, industry standards, and design principles aimed at creating exceptional user experiences specifically tailored for Apple platforms. Anybody hoping to build an Apple ecosystem product has to have HIG.
Apple provides its official figma kit (Open figma kit). This user interface kit includes extensive components, views, system interfaces, text styles, color styles, materials, and layout guidelines. Everything is needed to quickly and simply create stunningly realistic iOS and iPadOS app designs.
3. Ant Design
High-quality components are included in Ant Design, an enterprise-class UI design language and framework. Though it may not seem the nicest, Ant Design is a really excellent functional design solution.
As the Ant team wants to assist product designers in creating real products, the system provides a React tutorial with Ant system code samples.
The best part about Ant is that users of Figma can get all of the components and styling elements for free; (see the Ant Design UI kit).
4. Microsoft Fluent 2
Microsoft’s latest cross-platform app design tool is known as Fluent 2. Because the design language Fluent 2 employs shared styles as its foundation, it will be simple to match your design for both web and mobile.
The system offers numerous doable suggestions on how to produce an aesthetically pleasing design with a great user experience. But it also provides helpful hints for building UI elements.
There are two Figma UI kits:
• Microsoft Fluent 2 Web (Figma kit) facilitates the alignment of your web design with the recently released Fluent 2 design language.
•Microsoft Fluent 2 iOS (Figma kit) is a sneak peek at the iOS kit. The team is constantly actively adding new components; hence, it is still under development.
5. Uber Base Design System
Uber developed its base design system to establish a unified, scalable design language for its products and platforms, ensuring consistency, ease of customization, and a seamless user experience. Guidelines for designing (Open figma kit) user interfaces and experiences are included with the Base Design System, as are those for typography, color, layout, and iconography.
Together with offering a versatile and modular design language that can be customized to various products and use cases, the Base Design System is intended to provide Uber’s drivers, customers, and other users with a consistent and easy-to-use experience. Uber’s design principles—simplicity, clarity, and usability—are the foundation around which the system is constructed.
Among the main characteristics of the base design system are:
a concentration on modularity and scalability, which facilitates simple extension and modification of the design system to support new products and use cases.
an emphasis on diversity and accessibility, together with recommendations for creating user-friendly interfaces for people of various backgrounds and skill levels.
a single, consistent visual language used on all Uber platforms and products to create a memorable and recognized brand identity.
dedication to ongoing development and iteration, with frequent modifications and enhancements of the design system depending on data and user input.
6. IBM Carbon, Version 11
For products and digital experiences, IBM offers the open source Carbon design system. Working code, design tools and resources, human interface principles, and a thriving contributor community make up the system, which is built on the IBM Design Language.
Official Carbon UI kits for Figma are available from IBM.
7. AirBnB Design System
AirBnb is recognized as a trendsetter in product design, setting industry standards and influencing design trends across various sectors. Their philosophy of design is an amazing collection of rules and concepts that support the process of creating products.
Though the design community has several excellent examples of unofficial design kits, there isn’t an official AirBnb UI kit available from Figma. Isabella Scheier created a UI kit (Open Figma Kit) that is among the best.
Bonus: Other design systems worth checking out!
- Mailchimp’s Pattern Library
- Atlassian Design System
- Spotify for Developers
- Shopify Polaris
In Wrapping up..It’s clear that the design systems mentioned above set a precedent for excellence in digital design. They’re not just tools; they’re the building blocks of exceptional user experiences. Let’s take inspiration from these systems as we forge ahead, continually raising the bar for design innovation and creativity.
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Now, that’s a wrap. ✌️Hope you found this article helpful. See you in the next one!