Building a Design System: From Scratch or Existing Template?

A difficult answer to a difficult question. What’s the right one for your company?

6 min readJul 2, 2023

Design systems have become essential tools for UX designers, providing a framework for creating consistent, cohesive, and user-friendly digital experiences. Whether to build a design system from scratch or utilise an existing one is a common question for UX designers and a long-awaited topic I wanted to discuss. In this blog, I will be exploring the benefits of design systems, discussing the considerations when deciding between building from scratch or using an existing system, and outlining the best practices and necessities when constructing a design system. So let’s get started!

What is a design system?

A design system is a collection of reusable components, guidelines, and standards that ensure consistency in the design and development of digital products. It serves as a comprehensive guide for designing digital experiences and helps maintain a unified brand identity across different channels and devices. However, if you think a design system is just that, you’d be mistaken. It is a reflection of the vision, concepts, and values of an organisation. A design system that organises in strategic ways to help communicate, encourage certain behaviours, and guides people through processes.

Benefits of Using a design system:

Implementing a design system offers numerous benefits to UX designers and organisations across a business. Just to name a few:

Consistency: A design system enforces consistent experiences throughout products, promoting a cohesive and familiar user interface.
Efficiency: By providing reusable components and established guidelines, a design system streamlines the design and development process, saving time and effort.
Scalability: A well-built design system can accommodate the evolving needs of different teams and projects as a company grows.
Collaboration: Design systems foster cross-functional collaboration by providing a shared language and reference point for designers, developers, marketers, and other stakeholders.
Branding: A design system ensures a unified brand identity by defining the visual and interactive elements of a brand across various touch-points.
Accessibility: Incorporating accessibility guidelines within a design system promotes inclusive design practices.

Mentioned above are just a few benefits of having a design system. But it’s not always clear when a design system is needed in a company or even if it is necessary.

Do you need a design system?

When does a company know they need a design system? Though it’s not a black-and-white answer, there are a few indicators to know whether a design system should be considered. Though it should be mentioned that, more often than not, these points do not happen at the same time, so it’s up to the company to see when and how much resources they are willing to put aside to build one. Some of these indicators are:

Scalability and productivity: When a company aims to scale its design practice and increase productivity, implementing a design system becomes crucial. A design system allows the organisation to up-level its design language and mindset, enabling efficient collaboration and seamless communication across teams. It helps streamline design processes, enhance productivity for designers and developers, and ensure consistency in design output.

Brand integrity and credibility: A design system is essential for organisations with large, global teams to maintain brand integrity across various channels, applications, and devices. Good design plays a vital role in creating positive user impressions and influencing perceptions of a company’s credibility. By establishing a design system, businesses can ensure consistent design guidelines and processes, which contribute to improved user experience (UX) and consumer trust.

Efficiency and cohesion: Design systems make it easier to build and manage digital products by organising and standardising design components. They provide a library of visual styles, components, and guidelines that streamline the design and development process. By adopting a design system, organisations can improve efficiency, achieve cohesive design outcomes, and reduce duplicative efforts.

Improved UX and user satisfaction: Design systems act as a single source of truth for an organisation, housing all design elements such as typography, colours, icons, layouts, and more. By ensuring consistency and adhering to established design principles, companies can deliver better user experiences. A well-implemented design system helps create intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, leading to higher user satisfaction and engagement.

Learning and best practices: Design systems serve as valuable resources for learning and inspiration. Companies can study existing design systems, such as those used by industry leaders like Shopify or Apple, to understand and adopt best practices. Design patterns and methodologies shared through design systems enable product designers to leverage proven UX/UI approaches and optimise their own designs, without reinventing the wheel.

Challenges of a design system

A design system isn’t something that is built overnight, it takes consistent time and effort to create, implement and maintain. And if given the investment to create a design system, the fruits of your labour may not be seen for a while. This makes it difficult to get buy-in from leadership teams, especially if it takes time away from daily work or requires hiring more people. Other challenges of creating a design system involve:

Alignment and Governance: One of the main challenges of scaling a design system is ensuring alignment and governance across different products and teams. It requires clear vision, strategy, and processes to maintain and update the system. Without proper alignment and governance, the system can become fragmented, inconsistent, and outdated.
Adoption and Engagement: Fostering adoption and engagement among users, such as designers, developers, and stakeholders, is crucial for the success of a design system. It requires documentation, training, and support, as well as showcasing the system's benefits. Without sufficient adoption and engagement, the system may be underutilised and resisted, leading to inefficiency and frustration.
Performance and Scalability: As the number and complexity of components and products increase, ensuring the performance and scalability of the design system become challenging. Optimization, testing, and monitoring are necessary to maintain the system’s functionality and efficiency.
Cultural Collisions: Implementing a design system within an organisation can result in cultural collisions and friction. The adoption of design thinking principles and practices may face resistance and require changes in the organisational culture. Overcoming cultural challenges and fostering a culture of collaboration and co-creation is essential for successful design system implementation.
Implementation Complexity: Implementing a design system is a complex task that requires considering various aspects, such as visual details, accessibility, language, and maintaining consistency. Overlooking important elements or failing to address implementation challenges can hinder the effectiveness of the design system.

Overall, while design systems offer significant benefits in terms of efficiency, consistency, and scalability, addressing challenges related to alignment, adoption, performance, culture, and implementation complexity is crucial to see whether a design system is worth its investment.

Building from Scratch or Using an Existing Design System?

Deciding whether to build a design system from scratch or utilise an existing one depends on various factors, such as the organisation’s goals, resources, and specific project requirements. Let’s take a look at both.

Building from scratch.

Building a design system from scratch allows for customisation and tailoring to the organisation’s unique needs and branding. However, other considerations such as investment in time is crucial to factor in.

Flexibility: A custom design system can be specifically crafted to match the organisation’s design language and future growth.
Ownership: Building from scratch gives the organisation complete ownership and control over the design system’s development and evolution.
Resource Intensive: Developing a design system from scratch requires significant time, effort, and resources, including design, development, and maintenance.

Using an Existing Design System.

Utilising an existing design system can provide a head start and leverage the expertise and best practices of established systems.

Time-Saving: Adopting an existing design system reduces the initial development time, enabling faster implementation and iterations.
Industry Best Practices: Established design systems incorporate industry-proven best practices and user-tested components.
Community Support: Popular design systems often have a vibrant community, providing resources, updates, and support for designers.
Adaptation Required: While existing design systems offer a foundation, customisation might be necessary to align with the organisation’s unique requirements and branding.

In conclusion, building a design system, whether from scratch or by enhancing an existing system, involves understanding user needs, conducting audits, defining principles and guidelines, and prioritising component development. Implementing a design system brings numerous benefits, including improved efficiency, user experience, and consistency across products. Regular updates and effective sharing within the organisation contribute to the long-term success of a design system. I hope this article helped clarify any design system queries you had previously and gives you a deeper understanding of what a design system is.