5 steps to creating a Design System from scratch
Oct 7, 2025
8 min read
When people hear “design system,” they often imagine endless Figma files, strict rules, and big-company teams like Google or Microsoft. In reality, a design system is a set of shared rules and reusable pieces that save time, keep things consistent, and grow with your product. You can start small, add to it over time, and let it evolve naturally.
Step 1: Build the foundation
When you hear the words “design system,” it’s easy to picture something huge — endless files, complicated rules, and dozens of versions of every element. That image alone can feel overwhelming. But in reality, you don’t need a massive guideline to get started. The best systems usually begin with just a handful of essentials that define the visual language.
Start with the basics: colors, typography, and measurements. These choices shape tokens like spacing, radii, and text hierarchy — the building blocks for everything else. For example, if your brand palette currently has twenty shades of blue, reduce it to two or three core tones and apply them consistently.
Different companies approach colors in very different ways:
Adobe Spectrum: Highly structured: semantics (positive, negative, informative), separate rules for borders, backgrounds, icons, text, and decorative use. Ensures flexibility and accessibility at scale.
Material Design: Role-based: primary, secondary, tertiary, surface, error, outline, each with “on” and “container” variants. Strong accessibility focus and support for dynamic color.
Pinterest Gestalt: Practical and lightweight: palettes split into baseline, extended, and reserved. Baseline colors keep consistency, extended palettes provide flexibility, and reserved colors (like Pushpin red) are used only in brand contexts.
GitHub Primer: Minimalist palette: simple, flexible color tokens with a focus on clarity and readability.
Even these small steps make a big difference. Designers stop second-guessing which shade of blue to use. Developers no longer need to ask which button style is “the right one.” And suddenly your product looks and feels more consistent, even if your entire “system” is just a single Figma page or a short document.
The goal isn’t to capture everything from day one, but to lay a foundation. Once the basics are in place, you can build on them gradually. Starting small is often all you need to give your team clarity and direction.
Step 2: Create core components
Once the basics are set, it’s time to turn them into real, usable parts of your product. Components are the bridge between abstract tokens and the interface people actually use. Buttons, inputs, cards, modals — these are the pieces your team will reach for every day.
Don’t try to cover everything at once. Start with the essentials: the button styles that drive actions, the form fields that capture data, and the headers that structure your pages. When these are consistent and easy to find, your team immediately feels the benefits.
The best way to grow a component library is alongside your work. If you’re designing a new feature, take the extra step to polish the elements and add them to the system. Over time, this habit turns scattered one-off designs into a reliable set of building blocks.
Step 3: Document, don’t overcomplicate
Choosing a few basics is a great start, but they only become useful when your team knows exactly how to apply them. A design system is a shared understanding of how those elements should be used. Without that clarity, you’ll still end up with inconsistencies and endless back-and-forth questions.
This is why documenting the “rules of the game” is so important. And here’s the good news: documentation doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t need a polished microsite or a dedicated design ops team. What matters is clarity, not complexity. Start with the tools you already use — Notion, Google Docs, or even a simple Figma page.
Keep the format lightweight. For each element, add a short note about what it is, when to use it, and when not to. For example:
Use the primary blue only for call-to-action buttons, not for text or large backgrounds.
Headings should always use sentence case to stay consistent with our tone of voice.
The “secondary” button is for less important actions, never for the main user flow.
Even these small clarifications can prevent common mistakes and save a lot of time. Imagine a new teammate joining your project: instead of pinging you every time they need to know which button to use, they can open the doc and find the answer in seconds.
A great example of this is Wise’s design system. Their documentation is straightforward, practical, and easy to navigate — no extra layers of complexity, just clear guidance that helps teams stay aligned.
Don’t underestimate the power of a single page of guidelines. By writing down what feels “obvious” to you, you turn personal preferences into team-wide standards. Over time, this little document becomes a reliable reference point, and that’s the foundation of every strong design system.
Step 4: Share with your team
A design system doesn’t live in Figma files or Google Docs. It lives in the way your team works with it. If you’re the only person who knows it exists, then it’s not really a system, it’s just your personal notes. To make an impact, the system needs to be shared, used, and trusted by everyone who touches the product.
Start by making it easy to access. Put the link where people already work: in your team’s Notion space, pinned in Slack, or right inside your Figma project. Don’t bury it three folders deep where no one will find it. If the system feels hidden or hard to open, people will simply ignore it and go back to asking you directly.
Then, practice redirecting questions to the system itself. The next time a developer pings you with “Which button style should I use here?” resist the urge to explain it again from scratch. Instead, share the doc and say: “It’s in the system. Here’s the link.” At first, it may feel repetitive, but soon the habit forms: your teammates will start checking the system before they ask.
The benefits become obvious quickly. Instead of endless debates about whether a secondary button should have a shadow, you point to the rule and move on. Instead of spending half a day aligning on text styles for a new page, everyone applies the existing typography rules. What used to be a cycle of Slack messages, screenshots, and uncertainty becomes a simple reference check.
Sharing also pays off in the long run. When a new designer or developer joins, they don’t need weeks of back-and-forth to learn your “unspoken rules.” They have a starting point, written down and shared with the team. That clarity builds confidence and saves hours of onboarding time.
In short, a design system only works when it’s visible, accessible, and actively used. By making it part of your team’s daily workflow, you turn it from a side document into the backbone of collaboration.
Step 5: Build as you go
One of the biggest misconceptions about design systems is that you need to stop everything, lock yourself in a room for months, and come out with a “finished” library. In reality, that approach rarely works. Products evolve too quickly, priorities shift, and the team can’t afford to put real work on hold.
A more practical way is to build your system alongside your product. Every time you design a new feature, use it as a chance to add or refine components. For example, if you’re working on a new sign-up form, don’t just design inputs and dropdowns for that one screen. Take an extra hour to polish them and add them to your shared library. Next time you need a form, those elements are already there, ready to reuse.
Visual: мокап формы регистрации с одной стороны, с другой – более полный мокап с доработанными компонентами (поле ввода, выпадающий список, кнопку)
Over time, this habit creates momentum. The system grows naturally, feature by feature, instead of feeling like a massive project hanging over your head. You’re not aiming for perfection on day one. You’re collecting building blocks that get better with each iteration.
The beauty of this approach is that it fits into your real workflow. You’re not building in isolation, you’re building in context. That means your components are always relevant, always tied to actual product needs, and always improving based on real use.
Iteration beats perfection every time. By building as you go, you keep the system alive, useful, and aligned with the product, instead of chasing some impossible “final version.”
Let the system grow with you
A design system isn’t something you finish and then forget about. Just like your product, it needs to adapt and grow as new challenges come up. What works for a small app today may not be enough when you add new features, expand to new markets, or introduce new platforms. The strength of a good system is that it can evolve with you.
Think about how products change over time. Maybe you’re adding dark mode, which means your color palette needs an update. Maybe you’re localizing for new languages, so your typography rules need to cover accents or non-Latin characters. Or maybe your team is scaling quickly, and suddenly you need clearer naming conventions to keep dozens of designers and developers on the same page. These moments are natural points where your system can expand.
The key is to treat your design system as a living resource, not a frozen artifact. It should reflect the product as it exists today, not as it looked six months ago. Regularly revisiting your components, updating documentation, and pruning what no longer fits keeps the system healthy and trustworthy.
And don’t worry about keeping everything perfectly polished at all times. It’s normal for a system to have rough edges, especially as it grows. What matters is that it continues to support your team, provide clarity, and reduce friction. With each update, it becomes more valuable because it stays relevant.
A design system isn’t the end goal. It’s a companion to your product, evolving step by step, release by release. As long as it grows with you, it’s doing its job.
The power of just starting
Creating a design system from scratch can sound intimidating, like something only big companies with entire teams dedicated to it can manage. But you don’t need a huge, polished system to get real value. If you start small, write down a few clear rules, share them with your team, and keep adding as you go, you’ll already have the foundation you need.
The key thing to remember is that a design system isn’t about perfection. It’s about making life easier for your team, keeping your product consistent, and giving you a framework that can grow alongside your work. Even a single page of guidelines and a few reusable components count as a system; and that’s enough to start seeing results.
So don’t wait for the “perfect setup” or the “right moment.” Pick one element (your buttons, your colors, your text styles) and make it official. That’s your first step toward a design system. From there, it will evolve naturally.
