Design systems are built on top of many other systems, and each part has to be designed in context with the rest. Many people don't start creating a design system with a clean slate. We're often starting with something already designed, code already deployed, and customers already using interfaces. Over time, design decisions lose their purpose as the number of people who've worked on a single page grows, and the code behind the UI has been iterated on many times. This means working on design systems in not just designing the system itself, but also creating order from chaos.
In this talk I share my experience creating design systems. I zoom into a single part of the system—color—and show you how this one element scales and influences in ways you may not even think to design for.