What is a design system and why should you consider it?

• UI Components Library: Ready-made building blocks for buttons, forms, cards, etc.
• Typography and colors: Defined styles for text and palettes.
• Design patterns: Guidance for how components should be used together.
• Coded components: React, Vue, or similar ready-made modules for front-end development.
• Documentation: Descriptions and examples for using the components.

A design system is a collection of reusable components, guidelines, and tools used to build and maintain digital products with consistent design and functionality.

A design system is a collection of reusable components, guidelines, and tools used to build and maintain digital products with consistent design and functionality.

A design system and a CMS are two complementary tools that can improve both the user experience and the efficiency of the web development and content production workflow. While a CMS handles content management, a design system ensures visual and functional consistency across channels. When these are integrated well, the business can achieve faster development, higher quality and a more coherent user experience.

What is CMS?

A Content Management System (CMS) is a platform that allows you to manage, publish and organize digital content without extensive technical expertise.

Typical functions of a CMS:

• Creation and management of content.
• User roles and workflow for content production.
• Option to customize design and functionality via themes and plugins.
• Integration with other systems such as CRM, analysis tools and e-commerce.

• Challenge without a design system: Different pages can end up with different designs, even if they are made in the same CMS, due to manual customization.
• Solution with design system: The components of the design system, such as buttons, typography and cards, are implemented directly in the CMS theme or via modules. This ensures that all pages follow the same design standard.

Example:

A business uses a design system to define button styles. These buttons are implemented as CMS components (eg Gutenberg blocks in WordPress), allowing content creators to add stylish buttons without worrying about wrong design choices and branding consistency.

• Challenge without a design system: Front-end developers must create individual modules from scratch for each functionality or design element.
• Solution with a design system: Finished components from the design system can be connected to the CMS, which results in faster development of pages and functionalities.

Example:

The design system provides coded components that can be easily integrated into a CMS such as WordPress with Gutenberg blocks.

• Challenge without a design system: Web editors have limited options for design, which can lead to inconsistent layout and increased reliance on developers for smaller tasks.
• Solution with a design system: The CMS offers predefined templates and components based on the design system, so that the editors can create professional pages without technical support.

Example:

In WordPress, content creators can use Gutenberg blocks that are designed in line with the design system's guidelines, and that include the correct typography, colors and spacing.

• The problem without a design system: When designs need to be updated, it requires manual changes across many CMS pages.
• Design system solution: Changes to the design system are automatically updated in the CMS components, which saves time and ensures that the website is always up to date.

Example:

If the design system updates a button style, this is automatically updated on all pages in the CMS that use this component.

• Implement design system elements as CMS components (e.g. WordPress blocks)
• Ensure that content producers can adjust parameters such as text, images and links without breaking the design.

• Faster time-to-market for websites and functionalities.
• Reduced development costs thanks to reusable components.
• Easy scaling and maintenance across sites and channels.

For the Users:

• Consistent user experience of your brand (web, app, other channels).
• Better performance and availability thanks to optimized components.

Internal benefits:

• Less dependency between content producers and developers.
• Easier collaboration between design, development and marketing.

When a design system is connected to your CMS, a seamless bridge is created between design, development and content production. This provides consistency, efficiency and scalability, and lays the foundation for a strong digital presence.