5 Tips to Know Before Building a Design System
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About this talk
Building a design system from scratch sounds like a clean, exciting project — until the complexity compounds. This talk at WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2024 distilled hard-won lessons from real-world design system work into five practical tips every team should know before writing the first token. From governance models and multi-framework challenges to documentation culture and the importance of treating a design system as a product, the session offered a pragmatic roadmap for teams starting (or restarting) this journey.
Key takeaways
- A design system is a product — it needs an owner, a roadmap, and real adoption metrics
- Design tokens are the foundation: establish them early or pay the refactoring cost later
- Multi-framework support is harder than it looks — plan your distribution strategy upfront
- Documentation and DX are not extras; they determine whether the system gets adopted or ignored
- Accessibility is cheaper to bake in from day one than to retrofit across dozens of components
Resources