Elliot Rylands’ Post

🔥 Why Every Designer Needs a Design System (Yes, Even You!) Let’s talk about Design Systems – the secret sauce behind efficient, scalable, and consistent designs. So what’s the deal? A Design System is a collection of reusable components, guidelines, and standards that keeps your design on-brand and your workflow running smoothly. 🚀 Why It’s a Game-Changer: Less Redo, More Flow: No need to recreate every button or dropdown – the system’s got your back. Consistency FTW: Your users get a seamless experience everywhere (no random button colors here). Team Sync: Designers, devs, and PMs are all on the same page, speaking the same design language. ⚖️ Pros & Cons Based on Project Type: 🔹 Long-Term Projects: Pros: Saves time, reduces design debt, and scales easily. Cons: The upfront setup feels like a lot, but future-you will thank you. 🔹 Short-Term Projects: Pros: Speed + quality = mini design system magic. Cons: Okay, you might not need the full setup – but a few reusable bits can save the day. 🔹 Ad-Hoc Projects: Pros: Quick fixes with pre-made components can still shine! Cons: Creating a full system might feel like overkill – but a mini version? Totally worth it. 🎨 Why Figma is the Ultimate Design System Buddy: Figma makes building design systems a breeze with real-time collaboration and shared components. Build once, use everywhere. The best part? Your entire team can update and sync instantly. No design silos here! 🙌 Take it from me: a design system is worth every bit of effort! 💥 Share your thoughts. #UXDesign #DesignSystem #Figma #ProductDesign #UserExperience #UXTips #Collaboration #DesignEfficiency #ScalableDesign #UIDesign #DigitalProducts #UXCommunity #DesignTools #UXStrategy

Design systems are critical to ensuring cohesion and creating efficiency across your products. But balancing structure and innovation is key. Our insights from #Config2024 will help you make better design decisions while maintaining creativity. Check out our blog post for more takeaways from our Thinkers. 💭 #DesignSystems #Figma #UXDesign Figma

I often think about the future of design systems. 🤔 AI, new products, where will it take us? Here is an interesting look at some of the challenges of design systems, would love to know how others have overcome some of these obstacles.

Why does the final product never look like it was designed? 🤔 Check out our latest blog article by our Head & VP of Design Patti Habarta about bridging the gap between design and development. 👩🎨🌉👨💻 Seamless collaboration between designers and developers is crucial for creating impactful, user-focused solutions. Discover practical insights on communication, shared goals, and workflow improvements that help teams deliver smoother, more efficient projects. Read the full article here 👉 https://lnkd.in/d_DhMKXJ German translation 👉 https://lnkd.in/dC4-FNq2 #design #development #UX #collaboration

Working with design systems comes with its challenges. How can we overcome these challenges and use modern tools to encourage different ways of working. 🤔

I’m deeply passionate about driving business outcomes through human-centered design. For most of my career, I was able to do just that. I’ve designed systems, services, experiences, and interfaces that delivered extraordinary results. Things like: - 88% reduction in user input time - Orders of magnitude increases in trading systems throughput - A law amendment proposal - The rebirth of a D2C business unit These outcomes came from distilling and solving complex systems problems through transformative simplicity. Design, for me, has never been just about surface-level UX—it’s always been about crafting the underlying systems that shape the end experience. This involves: - Interaction and object models - Classification systems - Throughput and feedback schemas I’ve found that the best approach to this kind of design work is through divergent thinking and embracing diversity of thought. By welcoming a wide range of perspectives, you generate many ideas—most of which will be wrong. But amongst those crazy ideas, the brilliant ones lie. This process leads to novel solutions, breakthrough improvements, and ultimately, tremendous outcomes. This kind of work excites me. Helping organizations change at the system level to drive results is exhilarating. I miss it. Unfortunately, I don’t see designers doing this anymore. For some time now, “design” has been reduced to a production role, where creativity has been replaced by surface-level thinking and copying and pasting UI components in Figma. The only way I saw to return to the work I love was by starting my own firm. At ValueForm we’re committed to doing proper systems work that delivers true business value. I believe in this approach so much that I’m willing to publicly challenge what most organizations look for in a "designer" and tie my firm’s compensation to the outcomes we generate. Whether you’re a business seeking this kind of support or a designer tired of copying and pasting buttons, I want to hear from you. Reach out at [email protected].

Hey Product Designers, What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of Design Systems in modern product teams? 👉 Check out https://bit.ly/4d9H3mX for some interesting back story and insights on Design Systems, how we got here and where to next. #DesignOps #DesignSystems #ProductDesign #Product #UXDesign #UIDesign #UXUI

Oh wow, look behind the scenes of top product designers, working on Slack, Figma and Perplexity? Enter Sneak Peek by Jayneil Dalal. It's such a lovely inspiration for the product design community. And its all free. The promise is showing how top designers organise their Figma files, but it is way more than this: 💡 No split between UX / UI: See how great designers naturally move along the whole product design journey, creating concepts, prototypes, backing up with data, involving users, thinking about engineering feasibility, thinking about business metrics and creating final designs that are super polished. 💡 Good design takes time: See all the iterations needed to ship something good. You do 10, 50, 100 versions and see what sticks. The time for explorations, design critiques, feedback sessions and prototypes is usually highly underestimated within many teams. 💡 Good design is about context: See all annotations, background information, research insights, are incorporated directly in Figma, always keeping the essential context for design and engineering. 💡 Good design is in the details: See how much detailed work is required to create something simple. Something that just works in the end. There are no shortcuts here, it just takes time and attention. https://sneakpeek.design/ Check it out Felix Lebedinzew Carsten Meinecke Anna Sardini Fedor Shkliarau Ben Lowdon Oriol Bedia Konradin Breyer Elias Atahi Florian Fesch

Please forget one-man design teams if you want to deliver excellence (it's not a team if it's one man right?). Recently, I’ve had several discussions and presentations about the evolution of design systems (DS) and the transformative role of UI component creation within this framework. What began as a developer-driven process has now become a designer-centric responsibility, emphasizing the need to expand and empower our design teams. Meaning that the design teams must evolve, learn, and adapt to the new conditions. They need to transform. Companies need to give them the resources to do so. Design systems are integral to maintaining consistency and scalability in product design. Initially, developers were responsible for defining, mapping, and documenting components. Today, designers lead these tasks within the design system, limiting components' needs, usage, purpose, and scope. We now create and document component properties, variables, tokens, and modes, define auto layout, and ensure accessibility features, test components, communicate design decisions and of course iterate and test multiple versions. All these things are at a multi-layer atomic structure. This shift has had several key impacts on design systems and overall product design: • Enhanced Consistency and Cohesion: Designers overseeing component creation within the design system ensure a unified design language across all products, crucial for brand recognition and a seamless user experience. • Increased Innovation and Flexibility: Designers, with their innate creative problem-solving skills, can iterate rapidly and innovate within the design system, enhancing the overall user experience. • Improved Collaboration: Closer collaboration between designers, developers, and other stakeholders within the design system framework enhances communication and integration, breaking down silos and fostering a more cohesive development process. • User-Centric Design: By prioritizing user needs and accessibility from the outset, designers ensure that products are intuitive and accessible, leading to higher user satisfaction and engagement. Product teams should take note of these changes and consider scaling their design teams accordingly. Expanding the design team allows for more comprehensive management of the design system, ensuring that every component is meticulously crafted and seamlessly integrated. This growth supports the increasing complexity of modern design systems drives innovation and maintains a high standard of design excellence. #DesignSystems #UXDesign #ProductDesign #ComponentCreation #TeamGrowth #DesignExcellence

Starting with lo-fi design = faster feedback loops 💪 I believe that Figma makes us often focus on the final output too soon. Check this article by Pavel Samsonov where he explains why/how we should approach design process to get more knowledge in the early phases of the project. "(...) the biggest value of design is not delivering a thing faster. It’s delivering the right thing faster." "Low-fidelity artifacts don’t leave anywhere for ambiguity to hide. They are a very fast way to call out all the questions that we don’t have answers to — if we dare to ask them." https://lnkd.in/dttA6tCt