How to keep your design libraries neat and tidy — with joy

(In some way) starring Marie Kondo.

Keeping things neat and tidy — that’s a lofty goal for fast-paced and scaling design teams. Maybe you started as a team of one and knew exactly where to find the latest components — easy. Then hired one or two people and started building out your design system libraries, and — whoopsy daisy, things started to get messy.

And then there is Figma, our dream come true for collaborative design, which expands its capabilities on a regular basis. If you put a lot of effort into your design libraries, the need to maintain them increases accordingly. Want to harness the power of auto layout and component variables? Well, then better get to work and refactor your design libraries. And that’s not gonna be the last improvement they launch.

So how do you keep everything up-to-date?

Some teams have the luxury of working with a dedicated DesignOps Specialist who takes care of it. At Blinkist, DesignOps is a shared accountability across the product design team — split by platforms: Apps and Web. This means that if you ship a feature, you also make sure that the design system is updated with your latest changes and that your work is reusable.

Here is our process in a nutshell:

Say, a product team shipped a feature for our Android and iOS apps — we ship every two weeks. According to our app release cycles, we have a rotating Design Release Master™hat. That person owns our design libraries that week and carries the responsibility that our design files always resemble the latest version of our live apps. To do that, they follow this checklist:

1. Ping all Product Designers asking if they released something this sprint. Note: it doesn’t have to be live, just released on the release train.
2. Confirm they added everything to the Master files correctly. Proper placement, naming, and Android screenshots (if relevant).
3. Change file and cover titles to release number. (e.g. iOS 7.0.0)
4. Publish libraries on Wednesday.
5. Let everyone know the new version library is out.

This is how we keep things up to date. Now to how we keep everything neat and tidy.

Sometimes you need to do some deep cleaning

“The (Figma) space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.” — Marie Kondo

If you neglect to maintain your design libraries for too long, you dread using or even opening them. Soon enough, they become unusable. There are legacy components that need to be deprecated, updated brand guidelines that need to be applied holistically, auto-layout refactorings and the list goes on.

To counter this, Justyna Kusa, a Principal Designer on our team, introduced our so-called Marie Kondo Sessions. These are (somewhat) regular sessions where the entire design team comes together to do some collaborative maintenance. We all grab a drink of our choice and do mindless work like deleting old stuff, doing refactoring work, updating component documentation, or even adding those Android screens we always wanted but never found the time for!

“By acknowledging their contribution and letting them go with gratitude, you will be able to truly put the things (or components) you own, and your life, in order.” — Marie Kondo

This is actually fun. Why? Because we’re throwing around an unnecessary amount of Marie Kondo quotes. And because we’re in it together as a team. So it becomes part of our culture to contribute to design excellence not only in the things we ship but also in taking pride in setting a high bar for the libraries and file systems we work with.

Shoutout to the entire Blinkist design team and our alumni who played a key role here: Jaycee Day and Tulio Jarocki 🚀 .

And thanks to Yuhki for the suggestion to write about this.