How to Integrate your design system into your workflow on Figma
How do we integrate a design system on Figma? This question will be covered in this article. Many designers buy design systems from famous YouTubers but don’t know how to integrate the system into their workflow. If you feel your money was not well spent, don’t panic because I got you covered.
If you want to know what a design system is, I suggest you check out this article. The link is below
If you want to level up and learn how to build a design system on Figma the next article is for you.
Integrate your design system into your work-flow on Figma:
Typography: This is scalable typography containing two sections of each size. Display 1 & 2, Heading 1 & 2, and paragraph 1 & 2. Each of the sections has more attributes having the same name but different thickness. This should be enough to put them together. Naming is an important concept in Figma. Figma understands naming the same way as VS code understands syntax.
To integrate a text into your workflow, follow these steps. First, you open the text style panel.
Click on the ‘+’ sign to add a text as a text style. Give it a proper name for easy identification and click on create style.
Do the same for the rest on the row section of Display 1. Follow the same naming pattern. We use the ‘/’ sign to tell Figma the hierarchy of grouping.
When the naming is complete, then you can utilize it in your workflow without tweaking your text every time. You can now change the text to the font thickness of your choice. Follow the same naming convention for display 2, Heading 1 & 2, and paragraphs 1 & 2. If you have more sections to add, just follow the same procedure.
Now you have a working text style. You can change your text at your convenience. This saves you time and increases the speed of your workflow.
Grid: This is similar to typography. Naming in Figma is an important tool to help build a good workflow. Since this is similar to typography I would use two examples to demonstrate this.
The goal is to add this as a reusable component. If you want to know how to build this, I suggest you complete the article on how to build a design system on Figma, the link is displayed above.
To add a Grid style, we follow the same process as we did on typography. Click the Grid style icon, then click the ‘+’ sign icon to add a new grid style.
Give it a proper name.
Do the same for other screens.
Now we can use this on Figma whenever we want. Creating grids every time or duplicating multiple screens just to preserve your grid can be troublesome. This can help speed up your workflow.
Colors: This is similar to the previous two we discussed.
Following the previous steps. Click the Color style icon, then click the + sign icon to add a new Color style.
50–900 is for proper naming of the colors.
We do this for the whole set and we have something like this. I didn’t cover from 50 to 900 but the basics make the task easier to do. Now we have a full set of reusable color styles. Whenever you draw a frame and want to change the colors, just click on the color style icon and choose your preferred color as shown below.
How to Publish the design system across all tabs on Figma:
After creating the style guide, we need to make it available for all tabs. If you create a new Figma file, the style guide you created will not be available. To make it available, follow these steps.
Click on the assets panel on the top left corner of your screen, next click on the library icon. You can see it below in highlighted blue.
Click on publish to enable the design system available across all tabs.
Once published, the design system becomes like the ones listed above. You now have the option to toggle it on and off. If you have multiple design systems and want to use one at a time, toggle one on and the rest off.
If you want to make changes to your design system and publish it, follow the same steps and click publish changes.
Summary:
These can be also useful to speed up your designs and make you design your case studies like a boss. You can create style guides for drop shadows, effects, strokes, etc. Icons were not covered in this article because of the diverse nature of the topic and would be covered in my next article ‘How to use components and variants on Figma’.
I hope this article helps you develop as a designer. Feel free to drop a comment or leave a message to discuss this topic.
Thanks for reading :)
