— Stephanie Poce, Shopify / Source (Medium)

A challenge for a design system is the mix of creativity and fixed rules. Many designers feel restricted in their creativity with a design system. You could hear sentences like: »This is the best I could do, given the constraints of the system.« or »Can I change the styling?« We don’t want that designers copy a component and style it secretly to work past the design system. A good design system needs a healthy mix of strict rules and spaces for flexibility.

Allow creativity in defined areas

We don’t want the designers to follow the design system like a recipe book. We want them to invent new dishes:

— Yesenia Perez-Cruz, Shopify / Source (YouTube)

When we need consistency:

• If there’s a visual variation on components that serve the same function across brands.
• If a variation don’t do much to strengthen the brand’s voice.

From different templates for no reason (left) to unified templates (right). This is not the right place to have customization and bloat to the code.

— Yesenia Perez-Cruz, Shopify / Source (YouTube)

When we need variety / creativity:

• If there’s a specific problem that we need a new pattern to solve.
• If the component strengthens the brand’s voice in a way that serves our audience.

Components can be designed for the purpose of variation, for example this masthead component. The component was even applicable enough to a bunch of different brands.

— Yesenia Perez-Cruz, Shopify / Source (YouTube)

If you define ranges of your principles, you can also define in an easy way where variation of your system is allowed.

With this overview it’s easy to understand why designers can’t be expressive when designing the mobile app. But they can be expressive when they’re designing for social media.

Principles

According to Yesenia Perez-Cruz, Vox Media / Source (YouTube)

Enable creativity at the borders of your system