In this week’s lecture our tutor showed us how he assembles and turns design systems into components; it was very interesting learning about his methods but I feel as though this is only applicable to large scaled projects; because as a university student our projects change with each semester, and this might require as to build new design systems to better suit our target audience and/or interface.

I enjoy building new design systems for my projects and sometimes I reuse some of them. I usually start building my design system when I’m doing my lo-fi, I feel as though that is when I start to get new ideas on what I want to incorporate.

I think a reusable design system will be very beneficial in large products or a design firm/ company perchance due to everything being more or less the same. It will be very useful when I start my placement at DailyPay.

What is a Design System?

A design system is a collection of reusable parts like buttons, colours, fonts, and rules that help designers build consistent, aesthetically pleasing designs efficiently. It’s like a style guide or brand tile almost for creating apps or websites.

A design system is composed of:

• Components: Components are things like buttons, text fields, icons.
• Styles: Colours, typography, and spacing.
• Guidelines: These are ****rules on how to use those components.
• Code: This helps developers to build exactly what designers design.

Why is a Design System useful?

Design systems ensure consistency throughout all platforms so that users can have a consistent experience no matter what device they’re on. A design system also cuts down the amount of time and accelerates the development process of a product; besides this it makes team work very easy, cuts down redundancy and this leaves room for very little mistakes or messy design. This comes with a few challenges though, it requires consistent maintenance to ensure that it’s up to date.

What Is a Design System | Design Systems 101 | Figma Blog

Gestalt Principles

In my research I uncovered the explanation of the Gestalt Principles, which are rules about how people naturally see and group visual elements. These principles like proximity, similarity, and closure help designers create layouts that feel organized, clear, and easy to understand. They're used to guide the viewer’s attention and make interfaces more intuitive. This is all due to how the human eye perceives similar objects or grouped objects to be the same.

There are 12 different Gestalt Principles and the link below describes them all, after going through them the ones that stood out to me are ones that have been covered before in 1st year; they are:

• Emergence: This law states that we perceive the world without thinking much of it, this is because our brain quickly makes sense of things by small shapes as one.

• Closure: If things look alike, for example if they have the same shape or colour, your brain groups them to make sense of it, this is similar to the emergence principle.