How digital design systems reduce costs, scale frameworks, and build brand trust
Today, a customer’s relationship with a brand often begins with their experience on its website or app. As these digital touchpoints become even more central to the customer journey, they must be more than beautifully designed—they must also be reliable, accessible, and user-friendly. Here, we believe a design system plays a pivotal and often underestimated role, serving as the foundation for consistently building and maintaining your brand’s digital presence.
Branding in the digital space is an essential step and a significant investment for modern businesses. While a lot of thought, time, and attention often goes into brand building in the first place, as brands grow or expand into new markets, maintaining the same level of quality and cohesion can be challenging. Whether starting from scratch or building on something existing, a digital design system offers a structured solution that runs in tandem with your brand to establish trust, strengthen connections, and ensure a unified experience across products, platforms, and interactions.
What is a digital design system, and why does it matter?
For Will Moran, Creative Director at One Design, design systems in the digital space are about finding the tested, vetted, and accessible experience design patterns that can help your business grow.
“For me, a design system is not a one-time thing; it’s an evolving foundation of design patterns and components that grows alongside the business.”
— Will Moran, Creative Director at One Design
A digital design system offers a comprehensive collection of repeatable design elements, templates, and guidelines that serve as a single source of truth for building and managing a brand’s digital assets. More than that, it’s a mindset that encourages consistency and scalability.
Brad Frost, in his book Atomic Design, describes this concept as a “mental model,” helping us view digital experiences as both unified and modular at the same time—a perspective that captures the power of design systems in balancing big-picture goals with smaller details.
A design system, when done well, is that feeling of cohesion. Imagine you’re in a nice restaurant, but something feels kind of “off” aesthetically. You notice the cloth napkins they give you are different colors. The silverware doesn’t quite match. The doorknob to the bathroom is nice, but clearly has been replaced since the original. Without following a strong design system, especially over time, your company assets start to feel “off.”
Scaling digital experiences efficiently with a design system.
Once simply style guides or static libraries, digital design systems have evolved into dynamic frameworks that encompass every aspect of a brand’s identity—typography, color schemes, interaction patterns, and more. These cohesive toolkits enable teams to uphold design integrity across various channels and devices, allowing easy updates and consistent user experiences.
When our client Dscout, a user research platform, outgrew their static design system and CMS (content management system), we helped transition them to a more dynamic, extensible solution that empowered their team to quickly create new pages and campaigns as needed using their existing brand. Together, we reviewed their content and design, rebuilt their visual language into a codified system, and provided their team with the tools to expand the site confidently.
Easily extend and manage design as your business grows.
As businesses grow, their design needs become increasingly complex. Product updates, brand expansions, and new customer segments demand consistency and efficiency across touchpoints. Without a cohesive approach, design inconsistencies can emerge, undermining brand identity and user experience.
A well-constructed digital system solves this by providing reusable components, guidelines, and patterns as a unified foundation for designers and developers. Teams can streamline updates and align with evolving goals and customer expectations.
Navigate, an employee wellness platform, faced increased competition and higher customer expectations for their digital products. We worked with them to thoughtfully elevate and streamline their existing design and web app by delivering a cohesive collection of digital design elements and guidelines using their established brand. This system allows Navigate to maintain a consistent yet flexible customer experience as their platform and audience evolve.
Systems design helps you do more with less.
Not every brand needs a massive, complex digital design system. The key is understanding your team’s unique needs—whether defined by skill level, timeline, or budget—and focusing on solving specific business challenges. And sometimes, less is more.
A small, focused system can deliver big results. By thinking of content and design as building blocks, you can create a streamlined system that stretches to fit your needs without sacrificing functionality or scale.
For the Milwaukee Art Museum, we crafted a flexible digital system from their existing brand and design to meet ambitious goals within a strict budget and timeline. They needed to signal a new vision to stakeholders, enhance user experience, and enable freelance content creators to work easily within the system. With just one in-house developer, simplicity and flexibility were critical.
Together, we developed a suite of easy-to-manage components that ensure brand consistency, simplify content updates, and provide visitors with a seamless experience. Since launching in 2022, the system has empowered the team to create and manage hundreds of pages effortlessly.
An upfront investment that will save time and money in the long run.
A well-designed system fosters early collaboration between designers, developers, and content creators, creating efficiency across teams. Teams collaborate much earlier on, testing design patterns and making adjustments as needed. When it’s time for development to implement the design, it feels less like a “handoff” and more like passing the baton to a team member who is already in the race with you.
“A well-built design system allows us to start foundational dev work—like type, spacing, and grids—before design has finalized all of the components, allowing us to start earlier in the timeline.”
— Abigail Jackson, Sr. Developer at One Design
This shared language streamlines processes, improves collaboration, and accelerates development.
Imagine this: you’ve been tasked with redesigning your company’s website, only to discover it’s a patchwork of mismatched pages from years of inconsistent updates. When our client, ActiveCampaign, faced a similar challenge, they found that their site had evolved into a maze of bespoke templates and designs, shaped by countless hands over the years.
By helping brands establish repeatable rules, we create room for flexibility and unique expression.
We partnered with them to create a manageable and flexible digital system using a set number of templates. By thinking systematically, we implemented a solution that met their storytelling needs while ensuring consistency. With a shared source of knowledge, their team can now focus on creative storytelling, confident that each page aligns with their brand standards.
The most successful design system is one that you’ll actually use.
“For me, it’s about how well your client can use the design system and how much they want to use it.”
— Hannah Cormier, Designer at One Design
In Hannah's work with clients, she finds design systems thinking helpful for almost any project. At its core, a digital design system should make life easier for the people using it. By helping brands establish repeatable rules, we create room for flexibility and unique expression.
For DVLP, a biotech startup, she applied design system principles to develop a pitch deck with flexible, repeatable elements that also allowed room for customization. Our client uses the deck in every pitch, noting, “It is truly a design system that never fails to communicate a story.”
This is where we shine: creating custom, beautifully designed digital systems that make our clients’ lives easier. Good design isn’t good unless it works for you and your specific needs, and we believe the future of digital design is fluid, collaborative, and, most importantly, useful.
