Design systems: not our first rodeo

Recently, a new design systems project took me down memory lane, prompting me to revisit major design systems projects I’ve worked on.

Two projects stood out.

In 2021, we made a public design system for Smart. In this project, we focused on HTML/CSS components without JavaScript, so they could be used with any programming language — a strategy we chose due to legacy constraints. One aspect of this design system is that it's fully public — you can check it out at design.smart.coop.

Another big project that came to mind was Corilus, where we consolidated 15+ medical software products to eventually use one design system in 2018. The biggest focus of this project was using the Corilus brand in a scalable way across app interfaces that looked beautiful and worked well in a medical context.

Our templates and HTML/CSS delivery were converted into a clean React package by the dev team, leading to significant cost savings over time.

We see it time and time again; the design systems we build are used across many apps over a long period of time. From a business perspective, we see these systems as an investment in the future.

The level of investment in a design system is an organizational decision, where not every organization has the same needs. Typically, the bigger the organization, the greater the need for a system, but design systems can be useful in small organizations too.

What about the cost then? When you build them step-by-step, or cleverly reuse existing systems, it doesn’t have to be expensive. If you lean into a good front-end framework like shadcn/ui or Material Design, you can go pretty far with limited resources.

Speaking of shadcn, if you’re looking for a design system to seamlessly adopt into your product or project, check out our shadcn/ui kit for Figma, which has now been duplicated by over 7500 Figma users in the community. This kit has been a great help in designing quality user interfaces for our clients quickly, with a clear implementation path.

To conclude, it’s interesting to be able to look back in time. While Obra in its agency form is relatively young (9 months!), we have 7 years of built-up internal IP to reference. My previous company, Mono, provided similar services as Obra; and the challenge of design systems, clear documentation and great user interfaces is largely the same.