Building a Design System That Grows With You
Most design systems start as style guides. A few colours, some buttons, a Figma library.
But a real design system isn’t just about consistency — it’s about coordination. It’s a shared language between design, development, and product. A way to scale clarity, not just aesthetics.
Why Design Systems Fail
I’ve seen many systems start strong and slowly collapse under their own weight.
Not because of poor design, but because of disconnection.
When a design system becomes a side project — detached from real product needs — it stops being useful.
Designers stop trusting it. Developers fork components. Product managers revert to custom screens “just this once.”
Before long, the system becomes an artefact — beautiful, unused, and out of date. The lesson? A design system must be lived, not just documented.
Start With Environments, Not Components
When I built Rain’s first design system — a custom framework designed to unify their 5G digital touchpoints — I didn’t start with buttons or colour palettes. I started with environments.
How would this system behave in:
A dense transactional dashboard?
A marketing microsite?
A mobile app with low data latency?
By designing for environments, not pages, we created rules that could adapt and scale.
Each component was defined by context — spacing, hierarchy, tone, and motion — before visuals. That flexibility allowed the system to evolve naturally as new teams and products came online.
Design Systems Are About Decisions
A strong system doesn’t just tell you what to do — it tells you why.
At SecuritEase, our design system (“Streamline”) evolved around decision clarity. We built patterns that enforced logic:
Tables that prioritise trade-critical data by density and contrast
Colour and motion rules that signal system state changes
Documentation that explains the rationale behind each element
This turned the system into a thinking framework, not just a design library.
Developers understood the reasoning behind constraints. Designers could explain choices in measurable, behavioural terms - that shared reasoning built trust across teams.
Adoption Is the Hard Part
A design system succeeds when people want to use it. That means making it discoverable, reliable, and flexible.
A few principles that helped:
Build in public – Treat your system like a product. Share progress, open feedback loops, and invite critique.
Document behaviour, not just visuals – How should a dropdown behave when data is loading? What happens when a table has no results?
Evolve through usage – Your system should grow by responding to real implementation friction, not hypothetical scenarios.
Design Systems Never End
A design system isn’t a project — it’s a living product. It needs ownership, care, and continual refinement.
But when done right, it becomes more than a toolkit. It becomes a cultural anchor — the invisible framework that keeps products coherent, fast, and beautiful over time.
Takeaway
The best design systems don’t aim for perfection — they aim for alignment.
Because consistency is easy to automate.
But shared understanding?
That’s the real system.