Design Systems That Scale: Lessons from DisPlan

Building a design system that scales effectively is one of the most challenging aspects of modern product development. At DisPlan, we've learned valuable lessons about creating and maintaining design systems that we're sharing in this article.

Starting with Strong Foundations

A scalable design system begins with solid fundamentals:

• Design Tokens: Abstracting colors, spacing, typography into reusable variables
• Core Components: Building primitive elements that serve as building blocks
• Clear Principles: Establishing guiding principles for design decisions
• Documentation: Creating comprehensive guides from day one

These foundations provide the structure needed for sustainable growth.

Component Architecture

How components are structured determines how well a system scales:

• Composition over Configuration: Favoring small, composable components
• Prop API Design: Creating intuitive, consistent component interfaces
• Variants vs. New Components: Guidelines for when to extend vs. create
• Accessibility Built-in: Making accessibility a core requirement, not an add-on

This approach has allowed us to maintain consistency while supporting diverse use cases.

Governance and Evolution

Managing change is critical for long-term success:

• Contribution Process: Clear pathways for proposing and implementing changes
• Review Standards: Consistent criteria for evaluating additions and modifications
• Versioning Strategy: Approach to managing breaking changes
• Deprecation Policies: How to phase out outdated components

These processes help the system evolve without creating fragmentation.

Tools and Infrastructure

The right tooling amplifies a design system's effectiveness:

• Design-to-Code Workflow: Streamlining the handoff between designers and developers
• Testing Automation: Ensuring components meet quality standards
• Documentation Generation: Keeping documentation in sync with components
• Usage Analytics: Understanding how components are being used

Investing in these tools has significantly improved our team's productivity.

Cultural Factors

Beyond technical aspects, culture plays a crucial role:

• Cross-functional Ownership: Shared responsibility between design and engineering
• Education and Advocacy: Helping teams understand and embrace the system
• Feedback Loops: Creating channels for users to provide input
• Measuring Success: Defining and tracking meaningful metrics

By addressing both technical and cultural dimensions, we've created a design system that continues to scale with our product's growing complexity while maintaining the consistency our users expect.