A hyper-competitive global market drives business owners to elevate user experience and make it their key differentiator. This demand for better experiences puts pressure on a web design company. They must deliver high-quality web designs within shorter TATs. With no standardized design language available, creating a design system is the best alternative a web design company can leverage.
Web design efficiency does not come through hiring only. Every new hire will increase design entropy. As a result, inconsistencies plague web design projects, ultimately elevating project costs. Creating a design system process helps control this chaos by enabling a gradual increase in web design speed and consistency.
How does a web design company define a design system?
Components of a design system include reusable codes and design standards with clear usage guidelines. This and the components that unify them are stored in repositories and shared between designers and developers. All existing components and guidelines define the usage of reusable design elements, like headers, icons, fonts, colors, etc. This streamlines the web design process and ensures consistency in the company’s branding across all platforms.
Therefore, achieving web design efficiency is the primary goal of design systems. Hence, when making a design system, a web design company must ensure that the key components of a design system are homogenous and accessible. Each design system is also unique to a web design project. There is no one-solution-for-all standard applicable to creating a design system. However unique each design system might be, all of them have certain common elements.
Design process guidelines
Also known as design language, these rules apply to the layouts, fonts, themes, spacing, etc., used in website design and redesigns. These rules conform to the client’s objectives and goals and contribute to ensuring web design consistency.
Design pattern library
This library is a standardized storehouse of templates for color schemes, shapes, and other elements that designers can reuse throughout the website. They help save time and ensure efficiency by keeping the website’s look and feel constant.
User interface kit
Like the design pattern library, the user interface kit comprises emojis, widgets, and buttons. But unline the design pattern library, which concentrates only on aesthetics, user interface kits are built considering both aesthetics and usability.
Accessibility elements
They comprise essential rules and recommendations about website accessibility. To ensure a wider reach, a web page designer in NY must comply with the applicable Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Why creating a design system is essential for a web design company
Irrespective of whether the same team sees a web design project to maturity or whether there are new additions/deletions, the project outcome must remain the same. There must be no change in its quality, aesthetics, functionality, and usability. A comprehensive and accessible design system can result in quicker completion of the web design project without compromising quality. For example, instead of creating a widget to update a new webpage, a web design company in New York can save time and effort by copying an existing widget from the design system.
There are 4 main benefits to creating a design system. They are:
Consistency
Maintaining consistency in design elements helps build brand recognition. Web design companies can leverage a design system to maintain a consistent brand message throughout their design website.
Collaboration
The repository shared between designers and developers makes maintaining cohesion between their work easy and convenient. This fosters team collaboration, avoids duplicity, and prevents work wastage.
Speed and scalability
The project progresses quickly, with all team members responsible for a web design project on the same page. The TAT reduces, and web design scales efficiently.
Customer trust and loyalty
By making web designs resonate with a clear and consistent brand message, web design companies in New York can enhance user engagement and interaction, leading to increased conversions for their clients.
How web design companies in New York create a design system
Creating a design system is time-consuming, as testing it for efficiency and effectiveness is mandatory. However, the benefits of a design system far outweigh the efforts and the time invested in its creation. It is a meticulous and ongoing process, resulting in an affordable web design in New York. Additionally, it does not stop when people start using it. By ensuring accuracy from the start, a web design company can launch an implementable and accessible blueprint with confidence.
Effectively, there are 9 steps to creating a design system. They are:
Conducting a visual audit
Web design component duplication leads to fragmentation, which further leads to inconsistency. Hence, the identification of duplicate design elements is mandatory. Otherwise, a web design company might build a corporate website design only to find a replica already exists. Such a scenario will waste time, resources, and money. Hence, visual component classification within a product must always be the first step in creating a design strategy.
Auditing the visual qualities of the design elements involves:
- Highlighting areas that show the maximum number of inconsistencies within a product
- Identifying elements and components that are important and most used
A visual UI audit is a multi-step process that breaks down the web pages into their components. Once principle UI properties are identified, web developers analyze them to understand how they must integrate them to develop an affordable web design in New York.
Identifying the brand’s alphabet
The brand alphabet includes the brand identity, voice, and language. Effectively, it helps web designers integrate colors, typography, animations, tone, and shape based on the brand guidelines finalized by stakeholders. Understanding the brand’s alphabet helps a web design company to finalize style guides and design principles accurately.
Defining design principles
Understanding the idealogy behind the reasons that drive design decisions helps create exceptional user experiences. To maintain a balance and consistency in web design, a wordpress web designer in NY must organize their teams around a clear set of goals. These goals or design principles must answer three major questions:
- What is being developed
- Why is it being developed
- How will it be developed
Design principles should genuinely reflect the client organization’s values and align with their vision. A design system that best answers the above questions must be preferred.
Defining the rules
Delimiting designers and developers by making them follow a stringent design system will limit their creative and innovative abilities. Hence, it is better to create a framework that will guide them yet allow them to explore different approaches and ideas.
Defining the structure of elements
A design system’s success is measured by its reusability. However, creating a highly reusable design system depends on whether the integrated components are:
- Modular since they are self-contained and have no dependencies; thus, they help to create interchangeable and reusable components
- Composable so that new components can be created by combining existing components
- Customizable so that components can be extended and adjusted to make them work in multiple contexts
All UI components included in a design system must be flexible and editable. Hence, it is essential to upload the hands-on file of the component instead of a screenshot.
Creating a component/pattern library
Assemble and analyze all decorative and functional UI parts to understand their utility in the developed web design. After deciding on the relevant parts, discard all other parts.
Maintaining design system consistency among teams
Facilitating teamwork is the core idealogy of creating a design system. Hence, it is essential for all designers and developers involved in a web design project to be on the same platform. Integrate the design system into the team’s workflow to enhance productivity and deliver value.
Communication
A design system’s success lies in its ability to enable team collaboration. Hence, communicate all changes in the design system with all stakeholders across the web designing team. Updates that are shipped regularly must also be cataloged using a changelog so that every user can understand how the integrated change will impact their work process.
Establishing governance strategy
Design systems keep evolving. They are dynamic. Hence, it is critical to have a well-defined process that can approve changes made to the design system. A clear governance strategy helps a design strategy quickly adapt to a design system.
In conclusion
A well-crafted design system helps accelerate web design development. Integrating it within the team’s DNA empowers a web design company to ensure consistency and accuracy in the project’s outcome. Teams can produce enhanced user experiences and help amplify the design-driven culture of a company. Since creating a design system augments the productivity of the entire project team, it is essential to ensure extreme meticulousness in its creation.
Creating a design system will not only help a web design company. If the same company also works as a mobile app development company, having a design system in place will augment the productivity of the UI/UX team involved in the development. Hence, creating a design system offers advantages across different software design and development verticals. Web design and development companies must mandatorily include creating a design system into their development team DNA.
