Sketch Tutorial

How to build a Design System in Sketch (Part One)

Let me show you the foundations that need to be laid to start building up a powerful Design System

Marc Andrew

Published in

Design + Sketch

6 min readFeb 25, 2020

With this short Series of articles I aim to show you how to build the foundations of a powerful, versatile Design System/UI Starter Kit that will enable you to move much faster on your next project inside of Sketch.

Never start a design project staring at an empty Artboard again!

Build a strong color palette before anything else

With my own Design System; Cabana, and with any system that’s created, you need to keep your Base Colors to a minimum if possible (Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary). Of course you can expand on those Base Colors with Tints and Shades, but keep the actual Base options to a minimum whenever you can.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, you can create a beautiful site, or app with just great Type and Color choices alone, and having that wider range of Tint, and Shade options to play with brings a healthy amount of versatility for you.

Oh, and also don’t forget to add Black, and White (with varying levels of Opacity which are perfect when used with Icons for example) options, as well as a few variants of Grey to round things off.

You’ll also need to implement the obligatory Red, Green, and Yellow Base Colors (with Tints & Shades if you want more versatility), for Success, Warning, and Error Notifications, Badges, and Text Field Borders for example.

And don’t forget those multi-purpose Brand Colors…

You’ll find yourself calling upon these for many projects I’m sure. You could keep things lighter and leave them out initially, but it really saves you time to set these up at the same time as your Main Color Palette.

For my own System; Cabana, I opted for the usual suspects to cover as many use cases as possible on future products.

…and a healthy selection of Gradients too

Are Gradients an absolute must for a Base System? Maybe not for everybody, but like I’ve mentioned before, implementing them right at the start of a build can save you any back and to if a project in the future calls upon them.

If you do decide to add Gradients to your own System make sure, once more, you give yourself some versatility by maybe adding a Left to Right option, as well as a Top to Bottom option also.

Have plenty of Typography Styles in place from the get-go, but keep to 2 Font Families Max if you can

When building out your own System try and stick to the 2 Font Family rule whenever possible, otherwise things can become too overwhelming with the various Alignment, Color, and Size options you need to create for each Font Family.

C’mon Sketch follow Figma’s route and make things simpler in the future!

For my own System, I chose Inter and Oxygen due to the fact that they complement each other really well as base (starter) font families. You don’t need elaborate fonts as your Base options, they can be added later as the project dictates.

As well as creating oversized Display Styles such as Uber and Hero, I went down through the usual suspects of H1 to H5 using Modular Scaling, with my Body text size set at 18pt, and using a Ratio of 1.2.

The Body I set at a healthy 18pt just to improve legibility, and reduce eye fatigue, especially when using the Body style for long-form content.

As well as the Headings and Body styles, I added styles for Lead, Small, Caption, X-Small, and Tiny. With the latter styles perfect for when creating designs for mobile, and allowing myself the versatility to easily select a style for either Desktop or Mobile.

I created both a Regular and Bold weight for each of the styles (Uber, Hero, H1, H2, Body etc…) I’ve seen systems before opting for a Light weight in place of Regular (or even just Bold for the headings, with no option of Regular), but not every Font Family is that generous with weights and styles, and relying on a Light font weight when it comes to swapping out font families can cause more work for yourself in Sketch, so I tried to avoid that with just plain old Regular and Bold.

I repeated this process for the Oxygen font (Font Family #2), and made sure for both font families that I also created a Text Style for Left, Center and Right.

Once I had Black versions of both Font Families (Inter & Oxygen) all styled and at the ready, then I moved onto creating the color variants for each of them.

Using the Base Color Hex Values that I’d initially set up, I copied these across and created new Text Styles with the following colors applied…

Grey
Semi Grey
White
White (70% Opacity)
Primary
Secondary
Tertiary
Green (Success)
Red (Error)

Elevations & Shadows can play a key role also, make sure you have them in place

I created varying elevations for usage in both Light, and Dark designs, as well as Shadows that used both the Primary, and Secondary Base Colors, once more to add a little more versatility from the start.

The ability to quickly create a shape in Sketch, assign it a shadow of varying strengths within a matter of seconds massively cut down on the time it usually took to create shadows in the Sketch Inspector.

Once you have your base elements such as Color, and Type set in place then you can move forward with implementing elements such as Icons, as well as creating the many Symbols, Nested Symbols and Components that will build out a solid Design System, and I’ll be touching on these in later parts of this Series.

Colors, Typography, and Icons are the backbone of any great System, and every other Component or Symbol that you subsequently create is going to feature these elements in some shape or form, so it pays to get these into place first, before you create anything else.

You can check out Part 2 here.