Design systems are like a documentary of designs to the designers. In today’s fast-paced era, creating exceptional user experiences is paramount. That’s where UI/UX Design Systems come into play. From fostering consistency and scalability to enhancing collaboration and efficiency, a well-crafted UI/UX Design System enables designers and developers to streamline their workflow and deliver cohesive and delightful user experiences across platforms.
As a designer, you use these design systems to elevate your designs. Companies like Amazon, Google, Atlassian, and many more have their own dedicated design system, as they have multiple products. For a designer to get inspired to create their own design system, it is a great idea to have a look into them.
What is a Design System
A design system is a comprehensive collection of design elements, rules, principles, and assets that guide the creation of consistent and coherent user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX) across various platforms and devices. Companies create their own design system to have consistent maintenance around different products that fall under them. For example, Google’s Material design system contains all the details, rules, and guidelines needed to have consistent Google products whether it is Youtube, Google Maps, Google Photos, etc.
Design systems serve as a centralized resource that encompasses design patterns, visual styles, brand guidelines, and interactive components. A design system establishes a shared language and visual vocabulary for designers and developers, promoting collaboration and streamlining the design process. It ensures consistency in visual elements, such as typography, color schemes, and iconography, as well as in interaction patterns and behavior. The use of a design system is a win-win thing for design and development teams. By providing a structured framework, a design system helps maintain a cohesive and harmonious user experience while enabling scalability, efficiency, and faster development of digital products and services.
Benefits of Design System
There are tons of benefits to designing or having a design system for any organization, let’s look into some of them:
- Consistency: Design systems ensure a uniform visual and interactive experience across many interfaces, platforms, and devices, a design system establishes a collection of standardized design components, patterns, and principles.
- Scalability: Scalability is made possible by a design system when digital products and services expand and change. The design system makes it very feasible and fast to adapt changes within existing components that can be used to create new features and interfaces, guaranteeing a seamless and integrated user experience while minimizing duplication of effort.
- Faster Iterations: The efficiency of design iterations and updates increases with the implementation of a design system. The system’s ability to quickly integrate design changes enables rapid prototyping, user testing, and iteration cycles as only the main component needs to be changed or re-iterated.
- Ensure Brand Identity: As the design system remains the same for all different products of a company like Google or Amazon, it makes sure that a strong and consistent brand identity is presented to users every time they encounter any app from a company. Elements like colors, typography, and graphics talk about consistent brand identity.
- Collaboration: Collaboration and communication between designers, developers, and stakeholders are facilitated through design systems. Teams may collaborate more successfully, coordinating their efforts, and upholding a consistent design vision with the help of a common library of design materials and guidelines.
Now let’s look into the Best 20 Design systems across the globe which are created by big giants.
Top 20 Design Systems For UI and UX Designers
Companies make their design system open source such that people following these companies can get to know the details in and out. We’ll be looking into some very big and complex best design systems from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and so on.
1. Material Design – Google
One of the pioneers in the industry of design, material design is a benchmark for a lot of different products. There are many companies that look up to the material design guidelines to create their products such that they can be compatible with Android. Its user base is made up of both huge corporations and tiny entrepreneurs, and it is visually beautiful and easy to use. In order to provide a consistent user experience throughout the Android ecosystem, it offers a uniform visual language and set of rules. The M3 version is a beast and the latest update by Google on the material design system.
2. Human Interface Guidelines – Apple
Apple is known for its innovation and minimalism in design. It has a large user base and people find it very smooth to use Apple products. The only catch is that its use case is limited to iOS, this design system can either be referred to as limited or exclusive. There is no one like Apple when it comes to understanding such a large user base across the globe. Every year there is something new we get to see on Apple products. Apple basically focuses on how to offer distinctive consumer experiences.
3. Clarity Design System – VMware
VMware is another big tech giant which operates on an Angular tech stack. This design system contains HTML, CSS, and Angular components as well as freely available on Figma to be picked up and started using for your own product with a little tweak. The design system keeps on evolving whenever new changes are done, also it is very reliable and consistent.
4. AWS Amplify – Amazon
Amazon is one of the most complex and big design systems in the world, having tons of services and products which are used by millions of users on a regular basis. The design system of AWS is also very consistent and gives designers as well as developers complete freedom to tweak and re-use as per the requirement. The UI kit is freely available on Figma which can be directly copied and used.
5. Atlassian Design System – Atlassian
Atlassian began making big products, its design system is very robust and claims to give end-to-end design language to produce clear, understandable, and intuitive user experiences. All the design tokens and components are very clearly laid-out. The color system is very huge and brings a lot of detailed elements to the table. It is another great design system to learn and get inspired by.
6. Backstage Design System – Spotify
A pioneer in the music industry, Spotify never left a chance to go without amazing users. It is an open-source platform specialized and designed to ease development which is supported by a centralized software catalog and helps your product teams deliver high-quality code quickly without sacrificing autonomy by bringing order to your microservices and infrastructure. Bringing consistency and robustness along with all this.
7. Base Design System – Uber
Uber is known for its user experience and the ease of understanding it brings to the users. The design system is huge but comes up with tons of details which makes Uber products like the cab app, uber eats, etc very unique and user-friendly. It is designed to encourage a centralized collection of reusable UI components for Designers and Engineers. It is free and openly available on Figma which can be directly copied and re-used.
8. Carbon Design System – IBM
IBM has its own design philosophy which is to support individuals in producing their best work by giving them access to high-quality, unified, and open-sourced resources. IBM works towards human innovations, security, and many such great Carbon design systems that are built on the IBM Design Language and include working code, design materials, rules for user interfaces, and a thriving contributor community. IBM has a dedicated Figma page that brings a lot of details from the IBM design system like accessibility, design components, and guidelines.
9. Decathlon Design System – Decathlon
The Decathlon design system is a thorough framework that guarantees uniform and harmonious user experiences throughout all of the renowned athletic goods retailer’s digital products and platforms. It includes a collection of standardized design principles, patterns, and tools that give designers and developers the freedom to produce intuitive and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces.
It is available on Figma and has many different files which you can use to create something of your own. Its reusable components and predetermined styles, encourage brand consistency, streamline the design process, and increase efficiency. It places a strong emphasis on accessibility, responsiveness, and scalability, enabling teams to offer Decathlon’s clients across the globe top-notch experiences.
10. Fluent Design System – Microsoft
Microsoft is the oldest and most popular tech giant, which has multiple products like Microsoft Windows, Office Suit, teams, and many more. Fluent design system offers a consistent approach to design across their vast array of products and platforms. It provides a thorough collection of standards, elements, and resources to develop standardized, open, and understandable user experiences. The design approach places a strong emphasis on simplicity, inclusion, and clarity with the goal of making Microsoft’s products user-friendly and visually appealing. It encourages efficiency and collaboration between designers and developers, allowing them to generate high-quality experiences while putting forth less time and effort.
11. Goldman Sachs Design System – Goldman Sachs
The design system by Goldman Sachs is another amazing one, it is freely available on Figma which includes details about their grid system, various design components which are used in their products, and also a foundation UI kit to get started with.
12. Lightning Design System – Salesforce
Salesforce, a leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software, designs a system that is simple and easy to understand. It acts as a manual for designers and programmers who want to build uniform, open-access, and user-friendly experiences across all Salesforce platforms and products. It is available on Figma, and a lot of different files are there which can be leveraged to create something on your own. It is scalable and comes with detailed information about accessibility as first priority, enabling teams to create user interfaces that are clear and effective.
13. Spectrum Design System – Adobe
Adobe tools are one of the most powerful and renowned among the designer community. Adobe’s design system spectrum is also the same, including detailed information about each element used by Adobe while working on different tools. The Spectrum Design System provides a set of design guidelines, components, and resources that enable designers and developers to build cohesive and accessible experiences. Emphasizes scalability and flexibility, allowing teams to adapt and customize the system to suit their specific needs. It empowers many organizations and designers to create engaging and harmonious digital products.
14. Polaris Design System – Shopify
Shopify is a big e-commerce platform that allows businesses of all sizes to create, manage, and scale their online stores. Polaris design system is very detailed and simple to use, for any beginners. Comes with all the elements used in the designs by Shopify. Shopify being a hosting platform allows a lot of customization on its platform that leads to making Polaris even more robust and reliable. Polaris empowers Shopify merchants to create compelling and cohesive digital storefronts.
15. Primer Design System – Github
GitHub is a web-based platform for version control and collaboration that allows developers to manage and share their code repositories. Github’s UI is one of the finest and simplest as it is specifically designed to ease the work by developers, and comes with a light and dark theme. For designing and developing UI at GitHub, Primer is a collection of principles, patterns, and recommendations. It offers a common language and a set procedure for delivering integrated experiences.
16. Kyper Design System – MX
Kyper is the MX Design System for application styles and components. It has a few goals which ensure ease of use for developers as well as designers. It comes with react.js and IOS code snippets as well which can be used by developers.
Kyper’s goal says that the design system wants to:
- Establish a common language for all designers and developers.
- Serve as a central repository for UI styles and assets
- Serve as a resource for front-end developers to look at code samples and evaluate components graphically.
- Include detailed documentation of components.
17. Elastic Design System – Elastic
A huge and freely available design system that serves as a base for many personal as well as commercial projects. A major focus is on the aesthetics of design elements. It distributes UI React components and static assets for use in building web layouts. On their website, to help out beginners they have a full introduction document for beginners to help them get started with EUI and Kibana development as well.
18. Audi Design System – Audi
The goal of the Audi design system is to develop a variety of options and a well-balanced user experience across the entire system, from the app to the vehicle. An integrated collection of components, modules, and animations serves as the foundation for this.
19. Chakra UI Kit Version 2.0
Another amazing, simple, modular, and accessible component you need to design and build your applications. This UI kit Includes:
- Extensive typographic, color, and effect styles
- Component variations along with interactions as well as size and states
- Auto Layout powering dynamic layers.
- Implicit grid widths and spacing for pixels
20. Ant Design System – Ant Group
A popular and open-source design system that is regularly updated to enhance version compatibility. Designed from the ground up with a layout grid method, auto layout, limitations, and a minimal layer structure. This design system majorly focused on 3 things which are:
- Efficiency
- Accurate to code
- Always updated
Key Takeaways
After having a look at the top 20 design systems from companies across the globe, it is true that a designer can learn a lot of things from these. The listing below few major takeaways for a designer from these design systems that would help in better using the designs as well as creating their own design system going ahead:
- The importance of consistency is a thing to focus on as a designer. Consistency reduces cognitive burden and increases usefulness by making people feel familiar and at ease.
- Scalability & Efficiency is something which is provided by design systems in order to make sure elements are reusable making application-friendly design patterns.
- Accessibility and inclusion should be given top priority in design systems. They should have rules and elements that are compliant with accessibility requirements and fulfill the demands of various user groups.
As a designer, you should always keep in mind that design systems are living things that change over time. To ensure the design system’s continuous success, it’s critical for designers to actively contribute to its growth, get user feedback, and iterate on the system.
Must Check:
- UI Design Process: Everything You Need to Know
- UI & UX Developer – Education, Skills, Salary, and Career
- 10 Best UI/UX Design Tools in 2023
FAQs on Design Systems
1. What are the top 10 Design Systems for UI/UX Designers?
Top 10 Design Systems for UI/UX Designers are:
- Material Design – Google
- Human Interface Guidelines – Apple
- Clarity Design System – VMware
- AWS Amplify – Amazon
- Atlassian Design System – Atlassian
- Backstage Design System – Spotify
- Base Design System – Uber
- Carbon Design System – IBM
- Decathlon Design System – Decathlon
- Fluent Design System – Microsoft
2. What are the key components of a UX design system?
Key components of a UX design system include design principles, a style guide, a component library, interaction guidelines, content guidelines, accessibility standards, documentation, and design assets. These elements provide a unified framework for consistent and user-centered design across platforms.
For more detailed explanation must visit: Top UI/UX Design Terminologies That Every Designer Must Know
3. Why are design systems important?
Design systems are important because they promote consistency, efficiency, and scalability in design and development processes. They help teams deliver cohesive user experiences, save time on repetitive tasks, and ensure a unified brand identity.
