Building, maintaining, and distributing your Design System
Leveraging Abstract to manage and distribute your design system opens up the process to everyone on your team. We’re sharing a collection of resources to help you build your first Design System or your fiftieth.
Getting started with your Design System
If you’re starting to build your first design system from scratch, here’s how you can get buy-in, learn from other designer’s mistakes, and create your design system in Abstract.
Leaders share how Abstract has helped with collaboration, documentation, and visibility
Design Leads from Cisco, Zendesk, and Salesforce share the benefits of managing and distributing their Design Systems via Abstract.
Features to help build, maintain, and distribute your Design System
A source of truth
Abstract is your centralized place for design files. See the history of your work with branches, commits, and merges. And track every decision with comments and annotations.
Where can I get this file?” is a common question you’ll hear from the mouths of new designers joining just about any team. Alan says a successful onboarding process requires documentation and resources, and Abstract saves time by serving as a single source of truth for complex design systems.
Share your designs
Conduct virtual design reviews and share work with stakeholders, using Collections.
One of my favorite features in Abstract is Collections — I love how simple it is to grab screens from different files (in Master) and be able to compile them for a presentation at any given time for early feedback or even reference once a pattern has been completed and documented.
Anyone can contribute to the design system
Use Review Requests to give feedback on designs and document approvals.
We use Review Requests to make sure that what is getting put into the system is actually constructed the right way and meets all of the requirements that we have around accessibility. We’re able to close the feedback loop, directly on the work that is happening.
Making your Design System Equitable
Abstract distributes the hard work of design system management across everyone who touches the design system.
With our Git-based platform, there’s no need to limit the number of voices in order to prevent chaos. Abstract’s Branch-based version control makes space for everyone to be heard. Design decisions can belong to all of us.
