The value of opinions in
design systems
Creating and managing a multi-brand design system requires collaboration across departments. Designers and developers must ensure that contributions can scale within each brand’s constraints and support primary use cases for all teams. Without a strong, opinionated team, contributions can introduce unscalable methods, leading to system fragmentation and eventual breakdown.
About Nate
Nate has worked in design systems for a decade. He’s built white-label, multi-brand, and single-brand design systems at an enterprise level. Nate is passionate about design quality and systems-oriented design practices. He is the creator of design system tools LeonardoColor.io and Proportio.app. He is a color nerd and maintains the free resource ColorAndContrast.com.
Taming multiple design systems with a single plugin
The IDS Figma plug-in reduces time-to-value for our design customers.
Intuit has grown to include many products with unique brand identities, such as TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, Credit Karma, and more recently, Mailchimp. The Intuit Design System (IDS) was created to bring together foundational elements that would create beauty and coherence between products without losing their distinct brand identity.
But how do you get various siloed teams to consolidate on a single design system, especially when they are operating in independent design system libraries? How can you actively promote design system decisions in Figma?
We are currently experimenting with using a single Figma plug-in, specifically designed and built to promote Intuit Design System decisions and deliver them directly where designers are, giving them precisely what they need.