How can one learn about creating Design Systems on a Organization wide level?

[vijayksingh]

• What are the building blocks of a Design System?
• What is the skill set necessary to design your own Design System at a Project level first and then maybe at multiple project level?
• How can I develop intuition to look at the User Interface for the project and then come up with Design System?
• Is it an evolving process, should be designed first and then adhered to it?

[Neha]

Yes, DS (design system) is an evolving process.

It should start with Research Followed by:

• Design
• Development
• Documentation
• Testing

Design, development, documentation, and testing are repeating steps.

Let's talk about each step:

Research: It is the first and most important part of the DS. The research can be done by surveys to understand the products and projects - are they using any library, DS, for such tasks or not? Wha is their pain areas and what are the happy areas.

Designers needs to collaborate with the different styles getting used in the company across different projects. This research data will be the base of the DS.

The heavy lifting will be done by designers by providing:

• Color guides
• Typography
• Spaces
• Grids
• Voice and tones
• UX - Dos and Don't
• Design of the components or elements
• Responsive behavior
• Guidelines of usage of elements
• Themes
• Styleguide
• Design patterns

Developers:

• Defining architecture
• Development
• Performance
• How to consume the DS - CDN, NPM, script etc
• Technology stack

Skills for developers:

• Technical skills - UI and Backend
• Eye for design
• Understand UX
• Work on an agile basis
• Can see the bigger picture - as you are aware who will be using your DS and when.
• Can work with UI folks and provide feedback - UX and tech review

You can start with the scratch by making reusable style such as bootstrap and then move to markup and logic (JS).

Hope this is helpful.

Let me know if I missed something.