I like how the Gartner Curve describes the life cycle of probably any technology.
Five years ago, the community was wildly excited. From each iron they cheerfully reported that “we are the first company that introduced DC”, “we are the first agency that made a site on DC”. A catalog of domestic DCs appeared. But it seems that at the same time, few people understood what they were getting into. Sometimes I even got the impression that it was more a PR tool than a tool to reduce development costs.
And it seems that around the past year, design systems have finally overcome the trough of frustration and are now somewhere on the slope of enlightenment, striving to reach a plateau of productivity.
Now they are finally looking at DS as an investment in the product itself, as a way to reduce costs and increase the speed of product development. This is becoming a common product team work tool, not a hype toy for enthusiasts. And every decent (and some indecent) manager and designer should know about this tool.
What is a design system in terms of production
Probably the most important sentence of this article will now be:
A design system is a UI kit turned into code and linked to it, i.e. it is a [UI kit] [+] [code] system.
That is, UI kit ≠ design system!