When I started working on Diatom — SEL’s bespoke design system, built from scratch — I was just establishing myself as a web and UI/UX designer. I'd never worked on a design system in a professional capacity, let alone built one. Everything I know about design system ownership has been self-taught, built through years of iteration, research, and a lot of learning from mistakes.

Here’s what six years of that work has taught me.

Coming from the agency side of the industry previously, I found design systems incredibly rewarding as a designer — there’s something satisfying about establishing a foundation and then using it creatively. Once a design system has been established, it’s a fun challenge to use those components and brand elements to create designs that, while still aligned to the overarching brand, are genuinely engaging to the user. Add marketing goals and business objectives to that mix and the work gets even more interesting. 

But building is only the beginning. Owning a design system — maintaining it, evolving it, and keeping it relevant — is a different challenge.

Designing for longevity requires a different kind of thinking. How will this page of core content hold up for a year? Or even more? Will these elements still make sense to a user who revisits the page? You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time, but you do need to make sure they’re the best possible fit for your needs. 

To save time and keep our design system moving forward, I regularly conduct competitive research, analyze the latest usability trends for specific UI components, and audit our system to ensure we are adhering to usability best practices. This is something I prioritize within my own schedule outside of project assignments. 

AI is accelerating individual design workflows — and it makes it that much easier to fall behind. Everyone is moving faster and design systems need to keep pace. Gaps between a well-maintained system and a neglected one will become more and more apparent.

AI-assisted workflows have genuinely helped me here. I use them to run component audits — checking token consistency, flagging accessibility red flags, running heuristic analyses — and to write component guidelines, which is one of the most time-consuming parts of system maintenance. It's not replacing the thinking, but it's making the process significantly faster.

Small changes can have big impacts. One of the things I've come to appreciate most about long-term system ownership is that you start to see the downstream effects of small decisions. Adding in-menu lead capture forms to our navigation — a relatively contained design change — generated 3,926 form submissions over the course of a year. It taught us that our customers actively want to connect with our sales team directly, right from the navigation. That insight shaped how we think about user intent across the whole site.

It's those iterative changes, implemented carefully within the integrity of the system, that end up having the biggest impact on user experience and brand trust.