Symbols. We all know them well but do we really?

Somehow symbols are not used very often in UI design. Let’s take a closer look and find out what we can achieve by using these objects.

Before we start — what are symbols?

Imagine that your design has many instances of the same object. This is natural and you would probably create all these instances by using the old copy & paste methodology. That works but may lead to many issues. For example, if you had to change the design, you would need to update every single instance. That doesn’t sound too good, does it?

The solution: Symbols!

So what can we do with that issue? A typical application consists of many the same or very similar objects: icons, pop-ups, buttons, links or charts. Maintaining all these elements and keeping them consistent can be very difficult. That’s why you definitely should use symbols to store all your assets. A symbol can exist in many copies and on different artboards. The main advantage is that if you change one of the instances, all instances will be updated. Sounds cool? You may also “break” a selected symbol so that it is converted to an individual object. It gives us an opportunity to create a library of common symbols that are used across the design.

Symbols — we need to go deeper.

Okay, so far we haven’t discovered anything that an experienced Adobe Illustrator user wouldn’t know, but I bet that you haven’t tried to use symbols in symbols. The main idea is that often there is a need to change only part of a designed asset. In our example (a pop-up): a title, message and button labels, but not common elements like the container box, borders, used shadows, icons etc.

For example, this is our pop-up design, and we want to use it in our design system as an asset.

We could design our pop-up and convert it to a symbol but we couldn’t change the text without breaking it. The solution is tricky. First, convert to a symbol only those elements that are common: border, container and icon. Let’s name this symbol Popup-Container. Then, select the Popup-Container symbol with other elements: title, buttons and text message. The second conversion (let’s name it Popup) will give us quite an interesting structure. A symbol that contains the other symbol (Popup-Container). Now, if we place the Popup symbol somewhere and then break it, we may customize the message title and text and the rest of it will stay stored as a symbol.

Let’s wrap up all advantages of this technique:

• It’s perfect when you have no access to Adobe Cloud and its library because of security reasons.
• You are always sure that you are using the same source design.
• Asset maintenance is much easier.
• All symbols are saved in Ai files so you don’t need an Internet connection to share files with necessary assets.
• Symbols may have global swatches that save time when there is a need to change the basic design.