Design Systems

While setting up a design system requires an initial investment of time and resources, this pays off in the long run with benefits to both the business and your customers.

Design systems unlock workflow efficiency, design consistency, and scalability as your brand evolves and organization grows. 

Team members can leverage what design system architects have already built to get more done faster — accelerating your time to market whether you’re launching a new landing page or an entire site.

This efficiency can show up in a few ways:

• Faster page building and iteration: With a design system, designers and marketers can reuse components to rapidly build new pages with shorter iteration cycles, faster time to market, and capacity for more campaigns over time.
• Faster onboarding: New team members can make meaningful contributions sooner by quickly learning and understanding the project’s design philosophy from design system documentation.
• Streamlined collaboration: Design systems create a shared language for designers, developers, marketers, and any other stakeholder teams. This shared vocabulary reduces misunderstandings, streamlines the transition from design to development, and helps ensure brand consistency.

Design systems maintain a single source of truth across all of your digital properties. When disparate teams and partners follow the same playbook, they know how to confidently use and uphold a brand consistently. Design systems help ensure all of your digital experiences reflect your brand's identity, story, and values.

As your business grows, maintaining consistency and quality can become increasingly challenging. Design systems offer a scalable architecture that makes change management easy — even across multiple pages and sites

• Propagate visual changes with ease: Components and variables can be created — or existing ones modified — with minimal effort, ensuring the system evolves without losing its coherence or brand integrity.
• Effective change management: Clear guidelines and standards combined with well-defined processes and workflows all help roll out design system changes across websites.
• Continuous governance: Custom roles ensure that only your organization’s trusted design and development leaders set the expectations for your visual system. The rest of the organization upholds these best practices by using the design system’s building blocks as they design and build new experiences.

Not only do design systems serve your business and internal teams. They also promote seamless user experiences that drive engagement.

A design system ensures every part of your web presence is on brand with a consistent look and feel that helps build user trust and satisfaction. This consistency also aids in usability, as site visitors become familiar with your visual language and interaction patterns.

Creating a design system with accessibility in mind ensures as many people as possible can use your site without barriers or roadblocks. Centralized guidelines on the appropriate use of content, color, and motion, along with components that are ready for keyboard users and screen readers, can go a long way in promoting consistently accessible experiences. This is key in large organizations where individual teams may have varying levels of aptitude for inclusive design. Learn more about accessibility at Webflow.

Design systems in Webflow include variables, components, assets, and page templates. These design resources can be created on a given site, shared across your Workspace with Shared Libraries, or brought in from external sources with tools like Figma to Webflow.

The various building blocks of a design system can be composed for scalable web experiences, from the most atomic level (variables) to the largest compositions (page templates)

When working with multiple sites, use Shared Libraries to create a single source of truth for your variables, components, and assets. Sharing your design system ensures efficiency, consistency, and governance throughout a cross-functional organization. Learn more about Shared Libraries.