As digital products grow in complexity, scalability becomes the cornerstone of any successful design system. A well-built design system isn’t just about creating visually cohesive components; it’s about crafting a flexible and adaptable foundation that can grow alongside your business. Whether you’re expanding to new platforms, managing multiple brands, or scaling globally, a scalable design system ensures consistency, efficiency, and adaptability across all touchpoints.

Why Scalability is Key

Why scalability matters:

  • Efficiency for Growing Teams: As more designers and developers join your team, a scalable design system provides a clear framework that minimizes redundancy and streamlines collaboration.
  • Consistency Across Platforms: With new platforms (web, mobile, desktop) or additional brands, scaling a cohesive experience becomes exponentially more difficult without a robust system.
  • Faster Iterations: A scalable design system allows teams to rapidly prototype, test, and deploy features without rebuilding components from scratch.

Figma as a Scaling Solution:

Figma has emerged as a powerful platform for managing scalable design systems, offering features that directly address these challenges:

  • Shared Libraries: Create centralized component libraries that all team members can access and use, ensuring consistency across projects.
  • Variants: Group component variations (e.g., hover, active, disabled states) within a single asset to reduce clutter and streamline updates.
  • Cross-Platform Collaboration: Figma’s real-time collaboration allows designers, developers, and stakeholders to work together seamlessly, reducing miscommunication and improving efficiency.

Example in Practice:

Imagine launching a product with a small, web-only interface. Over time, you add a mobile app, localized versions for different countries, and even new product lines under the same brand umbrella. Without a scalable system in place, each expansion would require significant manual effort to ensure consistency. By starting with a robust design system that leverages tools like Figma, you can avoid this pitfall and scale effortlessly, even as your product ecosystem grows.

This article provides a step-by-step guide to building a scalable design system from scratch, with a focus on practical implementation, tools, and workflows that ensure long-term success.

Meal prep in bento boxes

Start with a Comprehensive Audit

Before you can build a scalable design system, you need a clear understanding of your current design landscape. A comprehensive audit of your existing UI components, visual styles, and workflows will help identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and gaps. This step ensures that your design system addresses real needs rather than assumptions.

How to Conduct a UI Audit

  1. Collect All Existing Assets
    • Gather all design files, component libraries, and style guides currently in use. This includes assets stored in Figma, Sketch, or older tools, as well as any documentation or guidelines.
    • Don’t forget to include developer-facing resources, such as code snippets or style sheets, to ensure alignment between design and development.
  2. Catalog UI Components
    • Create an inventory of all components, including buttons, inputs, forms, navigation elements, cards, and more.
    • Group similar components and note variations in style, spacing, or interaction patterns. For example, you might discover three different button designs where only one is needed.
  3. Review Visual Styles
    • Analyze color palettes, typography, spacing, and iconography used across your products. Identify inconsistencies, such as varying shades of the same color or mismatched font sizes.
    • Check for accessibility compliance (e.g., insufficient contrast or inconsistent font scaling).
  4. Evaluate Documentation
    • Audit existing documentation to determine its clarity, completeness, and relevance. If documentation is outdated or incomplete, it’s a sign that your design system needs better integration and maintenance.
  5. Map User Flows
    • Look at key user journeys across your products and identify where inconsistent design might disrupt the experience. For example, are form fields styled differently across different sections of your app?

Tools for UI Audits

  • Figma: Use Figma’s library features to consolidate components and spot redundancies.
  • ZeroHeight: Document components and style guidelines as you conduct the audit for an organized overview.
  • Spreadsheet Tools: Create a spreadsheet to catalog components, track variations, and document findings.
  • Accessibility Plugins: Use Figma plugins like Contrast Checker or Able to identify accessibility issues.
Screen of the Able Figma Plugin

Audit Output

The audit should produce a detailed inventory of:

  • UI Components: A complete list of reusable components, including notes on duplicates or inconsistencies.
  • Design Tokens: A catalog of colors, typography, spacing, and other tokens in use.
  • Gaps & Opportunities: Areas where components are missing, redundant, or non-compliant with accessibility or branding guidelines.
  • Actionable Insights: Specific recommendations for consolidation, standardization, and improvements.

Define Your Design Tokens

Once your UI audit is complete, the next step is to establish design tokens as the foundation of your scalable design system. Design tokens are the smallest, reusable building blocks that define your visual style — covering aspects like colors, typography, spacing, and more. By centralizing these variables, you ensure consistency across all components and make updates seamless.

Why Start with Design Tokens?

  • Centralized Control: Design tokens allow you to manage visual properties from a single source of truth. For example, changing a primary color in your token set will automatically update all components that use that token.
  • Scalability: Tokens are platform-agnostic, meaning they can be applied consistently across web, mobile, and desktop platforms.
  • Accessibility: By defining tokens for contrast ratios, font sizes, and spacing, you can bake accessibility into your design system from the start.
Figma local variables screens shows design tokens for Design System

Key Categories of Design Tokens

  1. Color Tokens
    • Define primary, secondary, and accent colors.
    • Include semantic colors for states like success, warning, error, and information.
    • Account for hover and focus states, as well as light and dark mode themes.
  2. Typography Tokens
    • Set variables for font families, sizes, weights, line heights, and letter spacing.
    • Define typography styles for headings, subheadings, body text, and captions.
    • Include responsive rules for adjusting font sizes based on screen size.
  3. Spacing & Sizing Tokens
    • Establish consistent spacing units for padding, margins, and layout grids.
    • Include size tokens for common dimensions like button heights or avatar sizes.
  4. Border & Shadow Tokens
    • Define standard border radius and widths for components.
    • Create shadow tokens for depth and hierarchy in your UI.
  5. Breakpoints
    • Define tokens for responsive design breakpoints, such as small, medium, and large screen sizes.
  6. Opacity & Timing Tokens
    • Include tokens for opacity levels, such as disabled states or overlay transparency.
    • Define timing functions and easing curves for consistent animations and transitions.

How to Define Design Tokens

  1. Start with Brand Guidelines
    • Extract core visual properties like colors, fonts, and spacing from your brand guidelines or the results of your UI audit.
  2. Standardize Naming Conventions
    • Use clear, hierarchical names for tokens (e.g., color.primary.blue, font.heading.large) to make them easy to understand and manage.
  3. Set Up in Figma
    • Use Figma’s local variables to define colors, typography, and effects.
    • Organize tokens into categories and subcategories within Figma libraries for easy access.
  4. Synchronize with Development
    • Use tools like Figma Tokens or Style Dictionary to export tokens into a format that developers can use in code (e.g., JSON, CSS variables).

Tips for Scalable Tokens

  • Global vs. Alias Tokens: Use global tokens for core values (e.g., blue-500 for a specific shade) and alias tokens for contextual use (e.g., button.primary.background = blue-500).
  • Dark Mode from Day One: Define both light and dark mode palettes simultaneously to avoid rework later.
  • Accessibility Built-In: Ensure your tokens meet WCAG contrast ratios, particularly for text and background combinations.

Build Modular Components

With your design tokens established, the next step is to build modular UI components — the reusable building blocks of your design system. Modular components not only ensure visual and functional consistency but also save significant time by eliminating the need to recreate elements for every project or platform.

Why Modularity is Essential

  • Scalability: Modular components can be reused across products, teams, and platforms, making your system more efficient and adaptable.
  • Customization: By building flexibility into components, you allow teams to tailor them to specific use cases without breaking consistency.
  • Consistency: Standardized components reduce discrepancies and improve the user experience across all touchpoints.
Figma components view showing iOS 18 components for Design System

Steps to Build Modular Components

  1. Start with Atomic Elements
    • Build atomic components like buttons, inputs, checkboxes, and icons first.
    • These elements should directly use your design tokens for colors, typography, spacing, and effects.
    • Example: A button component might use tokens like color.primary, font.button.size, and spacing.small.
  2. Combine into Molecules
    • Combine atomic elements into molecules, such as form fields (label + input + validation message) or navigation items (icon + text).
    • Keep molecules flexible by introducing parameters like size variations or state changes (e.g., active, disabled, error).
  3. Create Organisms
    • Assemble molecules into more complex UI structures, such as cards, modals, or toolbars.
    • Organisms should remain modular and adaptable, allowing them to be reused in different contexts.
  4. Leverage Figma’s Features
    • Use Variants to manage different states of a component (e.g., hover, active, disabled) within a single asset.
    • Organize components in libraries and categorize them logically (e.g., Buttons, Forms, Navigation) for easy access.
  5. Test for Responsiveness
    • Ensure that all components adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and orientations.
    • Use Auto Layout in Figma to define responsive behaviors like resizing or repositioning elements.

Best Practices for Flexible Components

  • Parameterized Design: Add customizable options for common variations like size, color, or icon alignment. This reduces the need for duplicate components.
  • State Management: Clearly define and build all possible states (e.g., hover, focus, error, success) for each component.
  • Accessibility Built-In: Ensure components include proper focus indicators, keyboard navigation, and ARIA labels where needed.

Tips for Handoff to Development

  • Use tools like Storybook to create a live preview of components for developers, complete with code snippets.
  • Export Figma components with annotations for padding, alignment, and token usage to ensure smooth translation into code.

Establish Clear Documentation

Building a scalable design system isn’t just about creating components — it’s about ensuring teams know how to use them effectively. Documentation serves as the central hub for your design system, providing guidance, examples, and best practices for designers, developers, and other stakeholders.

Why Documentation Matters

  • Consistency: Clear documentation ensures that components and tokens are used correctly and consistently across all projects.
  • Onboarding: New team members can quickly learn and adopt the system without requiring extensive hand-holding.
  • Collaboration: Documentation bridges the gap between design and development by offering a shared source of truth.
Apple Style Guidelines for buttons

Key Elements of Effective Documentation

  1. Component Guidelines
    • For each component, include:
      • A description of its purpose and use cases.
      • Variants and states (e.g., hover, focus, disabled).
      • Specifications like padding, margins, and alignment.
    • Example: A button component might include documentation for primary, secondary, and destructive buttons, with visual examples and code snippets.
  2. Design Tokens Reference
    • Provide a detailed list of all design tokens, grouped by category (e.g., colors, typography, spacing).
    • Include token names, values, and usage examples.
    • Example: A token like color.primary.blue might be documented with its hex value, accessibility contrast ratio, and sample usage in components.
  3. Implementation Guides
    • Offer step-by-step instructions for integrating components and tokens into codebases.
    • Include platform-specific details for web, iOS, and Android development.
    • Example: Show how to implement a card component in React using CSS variables derived from design tokens.
  4. Best Practices
    • Highlight do’s and don’ts for using components.
    • Example: “Do use the primary button for critical actions; don’t use it for secondary actions like navigation.”
  5. Accessibility Standards
    • Document accessibility considerations for each component:
      • Contrast ratios for text and backgrounds.
      • Keyboard navigation guidelines.
      • ARIA roles and labels.
  6. Versioning and Updates
    • Maintain a changelog to track updates to components, tokens, or guidelines.
    • Include notes on deprecated components and how to transition to new versions.

Tools for Documentation

  • Figma: Use description fields within components to add usage guidelines directly in the design file.
  • Storybook: Create an interactive library where developers can view components and access code snippets.
  • ZeroHeight or Frontify: Build a dynamic documentation hub that integrates directly with Figma libraries.

Tips for Scalability

  • Keep It Up-to-Date: Regularly review and update your documentation to reflect changes in the design system.
  • Make It Interactive: Include live examples, such as embedded Figma prototypes or Storybook previews, to make documentation more engaging and practical.
  • Promote Collaboration: Allow team members to provide feedback or suggest updates to documentation, fostering a sense of ownership.

Test, Iterate, and Evolve

Even the most carefully designed system isn’t perfect on day one. To ensure your design system remains effective and scalable, it’s crucial to test, iterate, and evolve continuously. This process helps identify areas for improvement, adapt to new business needs, and keep your system aligned with best practices.

Step 1: Test Your Design System

  1. Start with a Pilot Project
    • Select a smaller, contained project to implement the design system first, such as a landing page, a feature update, or a single app.
    • Use this project to evaluate how well the system meets real-world needs and identify gaps or inconsistencies.
  2. Gather Feedback
    • Collect input from designers, developers, and product managers who use the system.
    • Questions to ask:
      • Are the components easy to use and customize?
      • Is the documentation clear and accessible?
      • Are there any missing components or tokens?
  3. Test Accessibility
    • Use automated tools like Axe or Lighthouse to check for accessibility issues.
    • Conduct manual tests to ensure compliance with WCAG standards, including keyboard navigation and screen reader support.
  4. Conduct User Testing
    • If possible, test the system’s output with real users to ensure components meet usability standards.
    • Example: Evaluate how users interact with buttons, forms, or navigation built using the design system.
a hand holding a post-it note run a usability test

Step 2: Iterate Based on Insights

  1. Address Pain Points
    • Refine components or tokens that were flagged during testing. For example, adjust padding in buttons if developers report implementation issues or fix unclear hover states that confuse users.
  2. Expand the System
    • Add missing components or features identified during the pilot project. For instance, if you’re missing a dropdown component, prioritize its addition.
  3. Optimize Documentation
    • Update the documentation to reflect changes and ensure that it addresses any confusion reported by users.

Step 3: Establish a Feedback Loop

  1. Create a Contribution Workflow
    • Set up a process for team members to suggest updates or new components. Use tools like Trello, Jira, or Figma’s built-in comments to track suggestions.
    • Example Workflow:
      • Suggestion: A designer requests a new “alert banner” component.
      • Review: The request is evaluated by the design system team.
      • Implementation: If approved, the component is added, tested, and documented.
  2. Schedule Regular Audits
    • Plan periodic reviews of your design system (e.g., quarterly or biannually) to identify outdated components, optimize tokens, or align with new brand standards.
  3. Track Metrics
    • Measure the success of your design system through key performance indicators (KPIs):
      • Reduction in time spent on design and development.
      • Decrease in inconsistencies reported by QA teams.
      • Improved accessibility compliance rates.

Step 4: Evolve with Your Business Needs

  1. Adopt New Tools and Standards
    • Stay updated on the latest design and development tools, such as Figma updates, new plugins, or accessibility guidelines.
  2. Prepare for Scaling
    • As your product suite grows, ensure your system can handle multi-brand strategies, additional platforms, or global localization.
  3. Communicate Changes
    • Regularly inform your teams about updates to the design system, including new components, updated tokens, or improved documentation. Use newsletters, Slack channels, or dedicated meetings to keep everyone aligned.

Final Thoughts

A design system is never truly “finished.” By testing, iterating, and evolving your system, you ensure that it continues to serve your team’s needs, grows with your organization, and delivers a seamless experience for users. This iterative approach keeps your design system dynamic, ensuring its relevance and scalability for years to come.