The birth of the Digitec Galaxus Design System

Word gets around that I built the Digitec Galaxus Design System, so it is normal that designers want to share experiences. From these conversations I get the impression that many designers seem to think that the only true design systems are either from FAANG or unicorn startups, anything less than hundreds of components, documentation pages, animations, tone of voice and everything including the kitchen sink and you don't really have a design system in your hands.

Well then, this will be about how probably one of the biggest design systems in Switzerland came to be, and its humble beginnings.

When I got to Digitec Galaxus, it was already the biggest online retailer in Switzerland. On my first week I had a conversation with other designers that went somewhat like this:

Me: "so, is there a design system in place?" They: "no" Me: "a component library?" They: "no" Me: "a sticker sheet? Somewhere you have components you can share?" They: "no, we copy components from older files when we need them, but otherwise we just screenshot the website"

This was the state of things in 2017 at Digitec Galaxus. Far away from anything that resembles professional design inside the Product Development of a tech company.

And so I started the Design System, by building the buttons and all their states, so that I could use them while working on features.

I can hear you now. "Leo, I don't have the support of upper management to build a design system!". To which I answer, do the engineers need to have permission to build code libraries at your company? If they need to write code that is already being used for something, do they need to build it from scrach every time?

A Design System is the same thing, it just manifests itself visually as well, it isn't hidden in Git repositories, where management cannot see them, but such is the price of aliging everybody on how to build a product.