Building your teeny-tiny team’s design system
Tiny teams have very limited time to build design systems, so having a game plan is essential.
As designers, it’s extremely tempting to jump into design software and craft sparkling buttons and slide toggles. It’s what we know. But doing this might cause more trouble when implementing your new system than it’s worth. With a bit of preparation and research, you can save yourself and your team a large amount of work.
This article will be biased toward an atomic approach to design systems, as the small-to-large approach is a very good way to organize digital product systems. There may be other approaches which work better for your business goals.
In this series
- Does your teeny-tiny team need a design system?
- The elements of design systems for teeny-tiny teams
- Building your teeny-tiny team’s design system (You are here)
- Implementing your teeny-tiny team’s design system
Do some research
The first step is to understand how your developers and designers work. For the purposes of this exercise, anyone making design decisions, regardless of their title, is a designer. It’s also vital to…
