Building a design system might sound like a huge, multi-year project. But in reality, many of the best design systems started small — often with a handful of components, a few brand colours, and a lot of conversations across teams.
In this post, we’ll walk through how to start a design system from the ground up — whether you’re working solo or within a team — and how to grow it thoughtfully over time.
Why Start a Design System?
If you’re managing multiple products, teams, or platforms, consistency is hard. Without shared patterns, teams may:
- Recreate components from scratch
- Introduce inconsistent spacing, colours, and typography
- Solve the same design problems in different ways
- Spend more time on implementation and QA
A design system solves this by creating a single source of truth for how your product looks, feels, and behaves.
Start Small, Think Big
One of the biggest misconceptions about design systems is that you have to build it all at once. You don’t.
Instead, follow this mindset:
Start with what you use the most. Expand as you go.
The best way to start is by identifying your most commonly used UI patterns — buttons, headings, forms — and build from there.
Step 1: Audit Your Current UI
Start by reviewing your existing product(s) and design files.
Look for:
- Buttons with different styles
- Inconsistent font sizes or heading styles
- Multiple colour codes for the same purpose (e.g., blue links)
- Repeated layout patterns that aren’t standardized
- Redundant or custom one-off solutions
The goal is to understand the overlap and inconsistencies in your current UI.
Create a spreadsheet or whiteboard with these findings. Group similar patterns. This will help you identify what can be turned into reusable tokens or components.
Step 2: Define Your Design Principles
Before jumping into tokens or components, it’s important to set a design philosophy. This helps guide decision-making when creating or evaluating patterns.
Ask yourself:
- What should the overall experience feel like? (e.g., calm, efficient, playful)
- Should the design prioritise accessibility, speed, clarity, or creativity?
- What’s our brand voice and tone?
Having guiding principles makes your design system opinionated — which is a good thing. Otherwise, you risk creating a bland set of styles with no personality or purpose.
Step 3: Set Up Design Tokens
Design tokens form the visual foundation of your system. These are the first elements you should formalise and store centrally.
Start with these categories:
- Colours: primary, secondary, background, text, alert
- Typography: font families, font sizes, weights, line heights
- Spacing: base unit (e.g. 4px), margin/padding scale
- Borders: border radius, widths
- Elevation: shadow tokens
- Timing: animation durations and easing
Tools like Tokens Studio or Style Dictionary can help you manage and sync tokens between design and code.
Step 4: Build Your First Core Components
Now that your foundational styles are in place, move on to components — starting with your most frequently used UI elements.
Start small:
- Button
- Input field
- Heading
- Card
- Alert
- Navigation link
Each component should be:
- Designed with variants and states (hover, disabled, active)
- Coded using your tokens (e.g., colour tokens instead of hex codes)
- Documented for when and how to use it
Focus on accessibility from the start. A visually perfect component that isn’t keyboard-friendly or screen reader-compatible won’t scale.
Step 5: Choose Your Tools
Your stack depends on your team size, workflow, and platforms. But here’s a simple setup you can scale from:
For Design
- Figma – most common for shared design libraries
- Tokens Studio – design token plugin
- Zeroheight – if you want a hosted design system documentation site
For Code
- CSS/SCSS + Web Components/React/Vue – whatever your frontend stack uses
- Storybook – to showcase and test UI components
- Style Dictionary – for token transformation and export
Choose tools your team is comfortable maintaining. A low-maintenance setup that’s actively used is better than an advanced system no one updates.
Step 6: Create a Living Documentation Site
Your design system should be easy to explore. A well-structured documentation site helps your team find, understand, and use design system elements confidently.
What to include:
- A home page with the system’s purpose and principles
- Pages for each token group (colours, typography, spacing)
- Component gallery with usage guidelines
- Code snippets or Figma links
- Accessibility notes and best practices
- Contribution guidelines (how to add or update elements)
You can host this in a static site, Notion, Zeroheight, or a custom frontend.
Step 7: Establish Governance and Contribution Model
Even a small system needs a plan for how it evolves.
Define:
- Who owns the system?
- Who reviews and approves changes?
- How can others contribute?
- How often is it reviewed and updated?
You might start with a central maintainer (you or your team) and expand to a shared model later.
Encourage feedback loops — surveys, retro sessions, design critiques — to continuously improve the system.
Step 8: Communicate and Onboard Your Team
Once you’ve got your MVP (minimum viable product), launch it to your team:
- Host a walkthrough session
- Share what problems it solves
- Explain how to access and use it
- Provide a channel (Slack, Teams, email) for feedback
- Keep documentation open and up to date
Your design system is a product — treat your team as the users. Make their life easier, not harder.
Bonus: Avoid These Common Mistakes
- Over-engineering early – You don’t need tokens for every corner radius on day one.
- Skipping documentation – Unwritten rules are hard to follow.
- Ignoring accessibility – Fixing it later is much harder.
- Neglecting feedback – If no one uses your system, it’s not working.
- Trying to boil the ocean – Build only what you need now.
Recap: Your Design System Launch Checklist
✅ Audit your current design and UI inconsistencies
✅ Define your design principles and goals
✅ Create design tokens for foundational styles
✅ Build and document your first core components
✅ Set up tools that support design–code collaboration
✅ Launch a living documentation site
✅ Define governance and invite contributions
✅ Educate your team and gather feedback
What’s Next?
Once you’ve launched your design system MVP, the real work begins — maintaining, growing, and evolving it.