Whatever you do for your team or organisation, if you can document your tools and processes for others to use, you probably should. See Documentation & Handover for more on this. This philosophy of disintermediating your own role, and publishing your work in order to scale up its usage, is spreading to all parts of business. For the design team, this philosophy of sharing and scaling has been formalised in the guise of design systems.
A Design System is the single source of truth which groups all the elements that will allow the teams to design, realize and develop a product.
– From Everything you need to know about Design Systems by Audrey Hacq.
A design system might contain various components, including media files, code snippets and guidelines, but each system should be customised to the specific attributes of the product, project or business.
The Design Systems Handbook, by InVision, lists the following benefits of having a design system in your organisation:
→ Scale design → Manage your debt* → Design consistently → Prototype faster → Iterate more quickly → Improve usability → Build in accessibility
** Here the guide is referring to design debt, in a similar vein to technical debt in engineering.*
You can glance through some examples to see what you might include in yours, e.g. at Design Systems Repo; or 10 great design systems and how to learn (and steal) from them, by Elizabeth Alli.
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