Branding
A design system is a centralized collection of reusable components, guidelines, and standards that enable teams to create consistent, scalable, and accessible products. It bridges design and development by providing a shared language and toolkit, improving efficiency and quality across projects.
Without a design system, design consistency suffers. Teams often create duplicate components, styles vary widely, and development cycles slow due to lack of shared standards. This fragmentation leads to higher maintenance costs, inconsistent user experiences, and inefficient collaboration between designers and developers.
Material 3 (Material You) offers a modern, flexible foundation built by Google that supports dynamic theming, accessibility, and scalability. It provides both designers and developers with ready-to-use, well-documented components, making it easier to maintain consistency while allowing customization to fit brand needs.
Material 3 includes a comprehensive set of premade UI components—buttons, cards, dialogs, navigation elements, and more—that are designed for accessibility and responsiveness. Using these components accelerates development, reduces design ambiguity, and ensures UI best practices are baked in.
Material 3’s Figma library organizes a comprehensive set of design variables—including colors, typography, states, overlays, and more—into a clear, modular system. I studied how these tokens and styles work together, then customized and expanded them to fit our brand’s unique needs. This approach allowed me to maintain the integrity of Material 3’s structure while tailoring the system to our specific design goals.
Design tokens are organized variables for colors, typography, spacing, and other style properties that form the foundation of a consistent design system. I took time to learn how to correctly name and structure these tokens to ensure clear communication and easy interpretation by the development team. Serving as a single source of truth, design tokens simplify global updates and enable flexible theming across multiple products and platforms.
While Material 3 provides a wide range of ready-made components, many required deeper customization beyond basic color and typography changes to fully meet our brand and functional needs. I adapted and extended these components within Material 3’s structure and naming conventions to ensure seamless integration, maintainability, and clear developer handoff.
To maintain order and scalability, I structured design files following Material 3’s naming conventions and layered system—grouping components, tokens, and assets logically. This approach improves collaboration and speeds up iteration by making elements easy to locate and update.
Material 3 provides component variations (such as filled, outlined, and tonal buttons) that I leveraged to keep designs standardized and predictable. This consistency supports developers in building UI exactly as designed, reducing guesswork and errors.
By building on Material 3, we’ve set a strong foundation for future growth. As Material continues to evolve, our system can easily adapt—supporting brand updates, rebranding efforts, and new product features. This flexibility benefits designers and developers alike, ensuring long-term efficiency and a cohesive user experience.
