We have reached a pivotal phase in our product development journey where Design Systems have become widely recognized among companies. The concept of Design Systems, gradually introduced and pioneered by Brad Frost in his influential book "Atomic Design," has gained significant traction within product development teams and the industry since the mid 2010s.

Personally, I found the emergence of Design Systems to be a revelation in the realm of user interfaces. Once I grasped the immense potential of it, I became engrossed in exploring its possibilities. Throughout my journey of discovering the essence of design systems, I actively collaborated with numerous stakeholders.

This collaborative approach enabled me to look at some problems that I never took into consideration before in my design process. Gaining experience in building a design system from the ground up made me a better designer and a team member.

Design systems thinking have fundamentally transformed the way we approach UI design, fostering consistency, scalability, and efficiency across a product ecosystem. It has become a fundamental pillar in a company design philosophy, shaping not only our visual language but also the development processes.

The journey has been an enriching experience, fueling my passion for pushing the boundaries of design and collaboration. It continues to inspire me to explore new frontiers and leverage the full potential of how far we can go to deliver exceptional user interfaces.

As we move forward with technology, I am excited refine and optimize my next design system work, continually iterating and incorporating feedback from past experiences.

These are some of the problems I encountered in my previous experiences:

• Countless Figma variants (hard to use, wasting resources)
• Manually drawing redlines (other work in pipeline waiting which is more important)
• No standardised way of naming components (harder to understand structure)
• No QA processes for feature delivery (costly errors and rework)
• Lack of training and onboarding designers/developers (lower productivity, duplicating work)
• Poor governance and maintenance (creates tech + design debt)
• Inconsistent design patterns (leads to increased support requests)
• No version control (confusion, redudant work)
• Lack of feedback and iteration loops (mistakes, opportunity costs)
• No use of automation (manual work, increased costs)

A design system can cover all of the above. Saving the organisation money and time.