From Atom to Products – Developing Design Systems in Figma

This is a two-week practical course on design systems with the primary goal of equipping designers with industry-standard knowledge of design systems and teaching them how to create, maintain, audit, and communicate component libraries for maximum efficiency in the design process.

The course is divided into three parts.

Introduction to Design Systems:

Students will first explore what design systems are and get introduced to examples of well-known global brands that use them, such as Google (Material), Shopify (Polaris), and Uber (Base Web), to understand the why and how behind their design systems.

Building and maintaining Design Systems:

Having had a good grasp of what standard design systems look like, feel like, and function like, students will be introduced to the process of building design systems from the atomic level up to component libraries and design tokens and pages, also with a focus on maintaining and auditing them using methodic principles so they can be adapted over a product’s lifecycle.

Collaboration and communication:

Ultimately, well-tailored group projects will be conducted with students to teach them how collaboration and communication happen among design stakeholders using design systems.

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

– Understand the concept of design systems, industry-standard principles used for their development, concepts of atomic design and design tokens.

– Create and maintain reusable component libraries tailored for modern digital products.

– Evaluate existing design systems for scalability, accessibility, and usability.