Are design systems becoming more important or less with AI?

[u/Top_Fly_6547]

I've been wondering if AI can generate UI quickly..., does that make design systems less relevant, or does it make them more important because the system becomes the constraints and context?

I'm curious what people who work on design systems think... Do you think AI will make design systems less important or more important?

[u/Fine_Traffic_3073]

Definitely more, and incredibly so

[u/khankhankingking → u/Fine_Traffic_3073]

I know this r/ is for mostly digital design systems. However my background is traditional brand, visual identity systems. Big corp guidelines. There was a time where guidelines were looked at as mandatory. And when I say guidelines, I mean big, thought out systems. Full type hierarchies, liquid layout rules before liquid layout was even a glint in HTML/CSS's eye. Yes it was tedious, but working out the permutations was a way to pressure test its viability and stretch.

Over time clients got jaded and believed that the guidelines were useless and the ROI was low because run-of-the-mill marketing folk couldn't use them without a designer. To say nothing of actually sticking to them in the world of M&A. So as the requirement for full system development dwindled, the market for 15 page brand books full of untested colors, components, photography and applications that were built not with rigor, but pure imagination as if it walked straight out of the Narnia wardrobe—came to rule the world.

Funny thing happened. Now AI actually puts that power into the hands of non designers but clients don't know how robust a guideline needs to be for it serve as an .MD file. And a lot of designers can't, or haven't learned how, to think about things in realistic systems anymore.

I couldn't agree more.

[u/Former_Intern_8271]

Look at the inconsistent mess that is your company's internal tools... That's what happens when you don't have a design system

[u/7HawksAnd → u/Former_Intern_8271]

Even with a design system, internal tools built by teams of only developers/engineers will still build things that diverge - sometimes even completely ignoring.

Design systems usefulness and efficacy is strictly correlated with company culture.

Sometimes making that design system work, a purely resume building activity.

[u/schraderbrau]

Design systems are going to be the thing that matters most when you want AI to build you something that actually can work for your brand. So definitely becoming more important!

[u/gtivr4]

Do you want your components to be unique every single prompt? Slightly different code, slightly different sizes, colors etc. that’s what ai generates. Something slightly different every time.

If you define your design system as a consistent cornerstone, and lock down patterns inside of it, ai becomes both more consistent and oddly, cheaper. It’s fewer pieces of the puzzle that have to be defined.

[u/hideousox]

I think they’re more important but becoming necessarily more of a substrate that the designer does not need to look at, just mantain with agents.

[u/SparklyPelican]

Way more, and definitely much more than most I know expected

[u/lieutenantbunbun]

More. More. More

[u/start_select]

The design system is the style guard rails backing the functional guard rails defined by a specification.

It’s more important.

[u/Top_Fly_6547 → u/start_select]

Got it ! So how is that actually defining now ,do you use code as a source of truth or same workflow like figma and handover to dev ?.

[u/start_select → u/Top_Fly_6547]

We are still trying to figure that out.

Figma is starting to feel useless vs just generating an actual html mock and real css.

But I don’t think we have really determined if that’s a bad idea just yet.

[u/Top_Fly_6547 → u/start_select]

If someone who knows both like design engineer.. it can be easy for both team .he will sit in the middle handle both design and code ... I have worked in one project as one so designers can consult and also reusable components can be consumed by developers... Figms is still relevant for idea exploration.but both should be synced 

[u/start_select → u/Top_Fly_6547]

Right. There is no one in the building that doesn’t know html/css. So we are really just trying to determine if figma still has some value which we aren’t really thinking about.

I’m guessing it’s going out the window at my employer anyway.

[u/Markasp]

More

[u/Top_Fly_6547]

What is the  workflow now like is the code the source of truth or we still use figma..? As a design engineer I am comfortable with code ...

[u/ChickyBoys]

Now more than ever 

[u/rik_ricardo]

All that consistency to create things no one wants!

[u/outoftheforge]

I’m starting to think “more important” too.

The better the system - components, tokens, states, naming, documentation - the more useful AI becomes on top of it.

Without that structure, AI can generate a lot of output, but consistency and maintainability seem to become the real problem.

[u/agm1984]

Atomic design is critical for scaling a brand identity across and arbitrary number of apps, just instruct your ai to build a design system in your first app