From Style Guide to Design System

A style guide is a essential. Font styles and a color palette are crucial for consistency. More and more though, the process of iterating and managing changes and improvements to digital products (often on multiple platforms) requires something more detailed and robust than a simple style guide. The influence of Brad Frost’s Atomic Design System has brought about many different interpretations of what a design system is, but the main goal is simple: to conceptualize a product as a set of components, flexible in their usage and relationship to one another.

A system like the one I used at Nom not only helped to keep designs more consistent, but it helped to manage and make sense of constant iteration in a product that’s growing in scope and functionality, both for design and engineering teams.