Sketch Tutorial

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

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

4 min readMar 4, 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!

Icons. Icons. We need more Icons.

Every good Design System/UI Starter Kit needs a great set of Icons from the start.

Like I mentioned in Part One, the core elements for the foundations of a strong System are -

Colors
Typography
Shadows + Elevation
Icons

Other Core Components such as a Buttons, Inputs etc… are a close second, and I’ll touch more on these in Part Three of this Mini Tutorial Series.

Find a lightweight Icon Set for your initial build

For my own Design System; Cabana, I wanted a fairly generous, but not oversized Icon Set that would work perfectly for the bare-bones system before the need arose to bring in an Icon Set that had to be used for a specific client project.

I wanted something that would work perfectly for initial mock stages, had a varied amount of icons to choose from, was not too quirky in its style, oh and had both Fill and Line options available. And that’s why I settled on the superb open source set called Eva.

Like I mentioned, the Icon Set will change at some point due to the project you’re working on, and the assets you’ve been provided, but for a Vanilla icon set that is there for you to use on say personal projects, or early stage comps, something like Eva is a nice, subtle set that can work perfectly.

In the past I’ve tried various Plugins that can help automate tasks when adding Icons to your System, and they do, to a point, but in all honestly their Cons unfortunately outweigh their Pros, so manual it is as this moment in time.

Want to bring your Icons into shape? Use IconJar!

My weapon of choice (and it has been for a long time now) for keeping my Icon Sets in order is IconJar. It just works, and works well. Cannot recommend it enough.

Back in my System, and on the Symbols page, I simply dropped in one by one Icons from the Eva Icon Set. And the cool thing with IconJar is it will insert those icons with a 24pt Bounding Box already applied, which aids alignment and visual consistency within your designs.

Then it was just a case of attaching the Primary Base Color Style that I’d created previously, and converting to a Symbol. Job Done. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.