10 Inspiring Design System Examples (And How to Build Yours)

When you’re part of a small product team, it’s easy to keep everyone on the same visual page. But as your team scales and your product grows, consistency gets harder to maintain. Suddenly, aligning new designers and developers on styles, components, and brand voice takes more than a few Slack messages.

That’s when a design system becomes essential. It’s a shared source of truth that brings structure to your product design process — boosting speed, clarity, and consistency across teams.

At Eleken, we specialize in building design systems for SaaS companies. From startups to scale-ups, we help product teams establish scalable systems that streamline UI creation, improve collaboration, and ensure brand consistency.

In this article, you’ll discover 10 design system examples from companies like IBM, Shopify, and Google. We’ll break down how each system works, what makes it effective, and how you can apply those lessons to your own product. Then, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step guide to building your own design system, just like we do at Eleken.

To help you better understand these systems, we’ll include visual examples that illustrate how they work in practice.

Why do companies create design systems?

As digital products evolve, so do the teams behind them — and keeping everyone aligned becomes a growing challenge. That’s why companies invest in design systems. They’re not just about visual consistency — they’re operational tools that make teams faster, more aligned, and less error-prone.

A well-built design system acts as a single source of truth for designers, developers, and product managers. It includes reusable components, visual guidelines, design guidelines, documentation, and coding standards — all working together to streamline the product development process.

At Eleken, we’ve seen firsthand how a solid design system can:

• Accelerate the design process – no need to reinvent UI components for every new screen.
• Enhance cross-functional collaboration – everyone speaks the same visual language.
• Improve product quality – design systems help ensure consistency across products, so consistent design means fewer usability issues.
• Clarify brand guidelines – visual decisions are codified and easy to follow.

Design systems help create consistent digital experiences by providing clear guidelines and reusable components.

But it’s important to note that a design system isn’t just a style guide or a component library. Those are parts of the puzzle, but without structure, purpose, and documentation, they don’t create a unified product experience.

So what’s the difference? Let’s break it down.

Design system, pattern library, and style guide — what's the difference?

A lot of teams use the terms design system, pattern library, and style guide interchangeably, but they’re not the same.

• A style guide defines your brand’s look and feel: logos, colors, typography, voice, and tone.
• A pattern library is a collection of reusable UI elements — buttons, forms, nav bars — but without much guidance on how or when to use them. Pattern libraries often include design patterns—reusable solutions to common UI challenges that help maintain consistency across your product.
• A design system, on the other hand, combines both of these and goes further. It includes not only components and visual rules but also the philosophy, usage guidelines, accessibility standards, and code that bring everything together.

Think of it this way: A style guide is your wardrobe. A pattern library is a set of go-to outfits. A design system is your personal stylist, showing you what to wear, when, and why — consistently and confidently.

At Eleken, we build full-scale design systems that serve as living documentation for growing products. They evolve with your team, ensuring that every new feature, screen, or developer stays in sync with your product’s identity.

To give you a bit of inspiration for creating your design system, we assembled the best design systems examples you can learn from.

1. Atlassian design language

Atlassian, the Australian enterprise software company behind Jira and Confluence, has built one of the most comprehensive design systems out there. Known as the Atlassian design system, it’s designed to support agile teams throughout the entire product lifecycle — from planning to delivery. As a comprehensive toolkit for product teams, it brings together everything needed to create consistent and scalable user experiences.

Their design philosophy aligns with their mission: “Unleash the potential in every team.”

The system is broken down into six robust sections:

• Brand – Defines Atlassian’s mission, personality, and values.
• Foundations – Covers iconography, typography, layout, color, accessibility, and illustrations.
• Content – Offers tone of voice guidance, grammar rules, and content style.
• Components – The building blocks for consistent UI, such as buttons, forms, and navigation.
• Patterns – Reusable combinations of components that solve common UX problems.
• Resources – Includes color palettes, logos, Figma kits, templates, and dev tools. These design resources support teams in implementing the system.

What sets Atlassian apart is its attention to detail. Every component is thoroughly documented with use cases, accessibility requirements, and design rationale, making it easier for teams to build consistent, user-friendly interfaces at scale.

Why it’s inspiring: Atlassian’s system is not just a UI kit; it’s a scalable knowledge base. For product teams working on B2B tools or enterprise apps, like many of Eleken’s clients, it serves as a great benchmark for maintaining clarity, usability, and brand consistency in complex software.

2. Uber design system

Uber, the global tech company behind ride-hailing, food delivery, and freight logistics, needed a design system robust enough to support diverse products and user journeys. As their services expanded across countries and devices, consistency and scalability became a design priority.

Here is what Uber says about its design platform:

“We need tools that help designers stay in sync, common design libraries that provide them with our growing body of learnings and the means to recognize and apply our patterns to a diversity of user experiences. By grounding design at its basic level, we built a flexible system that empowers designers with the freedom to explore while keeping consistency and quality at the core.”

The Uber design system includes:

• Logo
• Brand Architecture
• Color
• Composition
• Iconography
• Illustration
• Motion
• Photography
• Tone of Voice
• Typography

In addition to UI components, the system provides brand application examples across various media—from printed brochures to digital billboards—helping maintain visual alignment at every customer touchpoint.

Why it’s inspiring: Uber’s system demonstrates how a centralized design language can empower large, distributed teams without stifling creativity. Uber's design team uses the system to establish clear guidelines for visual elements, ensuring alignment and quality across all products. At Eleken, we often work with scaling SaaS startups facing similar alignment challenges — Uber’s approach offers a great model for blending structure with design freedom.

3. Polaris design system by Shopify

Shopify, a leading SaaS platform for e-commerce, created the Polaris design system to ensure a consistent and empowering experience for both its internal teams and the millions of merchants using its products.

More than just a style guide, Polaris reflects Shopify’s core values:

• Considerate – showing care for people using the tools
• Empowering – enabling users to achieve their goals
• Crafted – prioritizing high-quality, thoughtful design
• Efficient – reducing friction through smart UX
• Trustworthy – reinforcing user confidence
• Familiar – ensuring comfort and predictability in interface use

Polaris includes extensive resources to help teams design apps and dashboards aligned with Shopify’s ecosystem. The system also includes guidelines for accessibility, layout, and visual design to ensure consistency and usability:

• Colors
• Typography
• Icons & Illustrations
• Sounds & Interaction states
• Accessibility standards
• Spacing & Layout rules
• Data visualizations
• Design tokens & reusable components

Whether you’re designing a native Shopify feature or a third-party integration, Polaris ensures consistency, clarity, and usability across all touchpoints.

Why it’s inspiring: Polaris strikes a balance between visual polish and functional clarity, making it a great reference for anyone building complex product ecosystems. At Eleken, we’ve helped SaaS clients in ecommerce and fintech implement similar systems that empower growth while maintaining UX integrity.

4. Helpscout design system

Help Scout, a SaaS help desk solution, created a compact yet effective design system to support small teams building human-centered customer support tools. While its design system isn’t the largest on this list, it stands out for its clarity, friendliness, and focus on brand alignment.

Help Scout’s core brand values shape its system:

• Helpful – making users’ lives easier
• Trustworthy – earning and maintaining user confidence
• Human & Organic – emphasizing empathy in interactions
• Energetic – keeping designs lively, not sterile
• Curious – always striving to improve

The system is divided into three concise sections, which serve as the basic building blocks of Help Scout's design system:

• Visual Elements – logo usage, color palette, typography, iconography
• Content Style – tone of voice, writing guidelines, grammar conventions
• Product Design – UI components, interaction principles, layout rules

Despite its simplicity, the Help Scout system provides everything designers need to craft a cohesive user experience across their support suite, including ticketing, help documents, and live chat.

Why it’s inspiring: Help Scout proves that a design system doesn’t need to be massive to be meaningful. At Eleken, we often help lean teams build lightweight, scalable systems like this — focused on clarity, usability, and fast implementation without sacrificing design integrity.

5. Canvas design system by Hubspot

HubSpot, known for its robust CRM and inbound marketing software, developed the Canvas design system to streamline collaboration across product teams and ensure a cohesive brand experience.

Here is what HubSpot says about Canvas, their design system:

“This library is a window into how we build our products here at HubSpot and what it’s like to build the HubSpot product. We’re sharing it because we’re proud of the time and effort we’ve put into creating our design system and optimizing it for developers and designers so that we can keep it evergreen.”

Canvas is more than a style guide — it’s a living design ecosystem used across all of HubSpot’s digital products. It empowers designers and developers to move faster without sacrificing quality or brand alignment.

Key system elements include:

• Components – buttons, cards, forms, and layout blocks
• Graphs – standards for data visualization
• Patterns – repeatable UI solutions to common problems; these pattern libraries help teams solve common UI problems consistently by providing a collection of reusable UI components and design assets.
• Styles – colors, typography, spacing, and visual hierarchy
• Editor – tools and tokens for extending the system

Canvas is particularly strong in its developer tooling. It provides React components, color tokens, and layout systems that developers can plug into instantly, making cross-functional handoffs smoother and more predictable.

Why it’s inspiring: Canvas shows how a design system can reflect not just a brand’s visual identity, but its organizational culture. At Eleken, we often help SaaS companies like HubSpot build systems that evolve with their products, combining solid foundations with flexibility and scale.

6. Mailchimp design system

Mailchimp, the email marketing and automation platform, was an early adopter of design systems—establishing their framework before it became standard across the industry. Their system was born out of necessity: with so many creative teams working under one roof, the challenge wasn’t just building components, but creating alignment without stifling creativity.

Here’s how Mailchimp put it:

“One main goal of this new brand identity is to provide a consistent structure to our design language. We have a lot of creative people with unique voices under one roof, which can be inspiring — and messy. To keep the system from feeling disjointed, we have introduced a framework of core components, so that the elements existing inside of it can be as free and expressive as we want.”

Their design system strikes a balance between structure and playfulness—making it approachable, expressive, and highly functional.

The system includes two main sections:

• Foundations – color palettes, typography, spacing, and iconography
• Components – buttons, forms, inputs, cards, and more

What makes Mailchimp’s approach unique is its embrace of brand personality. While many design systems aim for neutrality and utility, Mailchimp leans into quirkiness and emotional tone without losing consistency. Content designers play a key role in this process, ensuring a consistent voice and tone across all Mailchimp products by contributing to and utilizing unified guidelines within the design system. This results in a distinct, human-centered interface that feels both polished and personal.

Why it’s inspiring:Mailchimp proves that a design system doesn’t have to be rigid. At Eleken, we often help clients find this sweet spot—where structure supports creativity, not stifles it.

7. Zendesk design system

Zendesk, known for its customer support and engagement tools, takes a holistic approach to design systems. Their system — Garden — isn’t just a component library; it’s a cross-functional knowledge base built to bridge design, content, and engineering.

Zendesk describes Garden as:

“The source of truth for tools, standards, and best practices when building products at Zendesk.”

It’s also “an evolving library of shared knowledge that intentionally blurs the line between design, content strategy, and engineering to reinforce a cohesive user experience throughout Zendesk’s product suite.”

This philosophy shows in how the Garden system is structured. It’s not just about buttons and layouts—it’s about language, accessibility, tone, and a shared product vision.

Core system elements include:

• Content – voice and tone guidance, grammar rules, word lists
• Design – foundational elements like colors and icons
• Components – UI building blocks such as buttons, dropdowns, forms, loaders, and typography
• Theming – tools to support branding flexibility across Zendesk’s vast product landscape

Garden is particularly strong in its interdisciplinary focus, enabling consistency not just visually, but also in voice and usability. That’s especially critical for a company like Zendesk that supports millions of customer interactions every day. This interdisciplinary approach ensures an accessible experience for all users, promoting inclusivity and high accessibility standards across Zendesk’s platforms.

Why it’s inspiring:Garden reminds us that great design systems support not just what users see, but how they experience it — across visual design, content, and interaction. At Eleken, we believe this is what turns a good system into a great one.

8. IBM Carbon Design System

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IBM’s Carbon Design System is a robust open-source system created to support the development of consistent and accessible products across IBM’s vast portfolio. Built with flexibility in mind, Carbon empowers teams to create seamless user experiences across web and product interfaces.

Carbon's mission centers around creating "a consistent experience for all IBM products and digital platforms" with accessibility, scalability, and modularity at its core.

Design system elements include:

• Guidelines for color, typography, layout, accessibility, and theming
• Reusable components built in React, Vue, Svelte, and Web Components
• Design tokens that define foundational elements like spacing, elevation, and breakpoints
• Templates and patterns for common UI structures and interactions
• Accessibility features are baked into components to meet WCAG standards

What sets Carbon apart is its developer-first mindset — all components are meticulously documented, versioned, and designed for use in large-scale enterprise products. It also comes with Figma libraries and built-in support for customization and branding at scale.

Why it's inspiring:
If you’re designing a product for enterprise use, prioritizing accessibility, or need a design system that can scale across multiple apps and platforms, Carbon is a masterclass in doing it right.

9. Google Material Design

Material Design is Google’s design system for crafting digital experiences that are consistent, intuitive, and visually engaging across Android, web, and beyond. Originally introduced in 2014 and regularly updated since, Material Design blends principles of good graphic design with motion, depth, and responsiveness to create interfaces that feel tactile and interactive.

Google describes it as “a design system built to help teams build high-quality digital experiences for Android, iOS, Flutter, and the web.”

Key components of Material Design include:

• Design foundations: Color, typography, layout, elevation, and motion
• Component libraries: Fully accessible, responsive, and themable UI components for web and mobile
• Design tokens: For consistent spacing, color, and behavior across platforms
• Material Theme Builder: A tool that allows teams to create custom design tokens and see live previews
• Documentation and tooling: Deep guides, live examples, and code integrations for React, Flutter, Android, and iOS

Material Design is known for its visual hierarchy, depth (via shadows and layers), and responsive motion. It’s especially valuable for cross-platform products that need a clean, consistent look and feel while still allowing for brand personalization.

Why it's inspiring:
Material Design isn’t just a set of components — it’s a design philosophy backed by years of research. Whether you’re designing for mobile-first experiences or need strong accessibility and documentation, Material offers both aesthetic flexibility and practical power.

10. Fluent 2 Design System by Microsoft

Fluent 2 is Microsoft’s latest evolution of its Fluent Design System—refined for modern cross-platform product development. It aims to unify design across Windows, Microsoft 365, web, and mobile products by offering a coherent visual language and UI framework that prioritizes accessibility, flexibility, and performance.

Fluent 2 is built to meet the needs of multi-platform, collaborative software development, offering scalable components and design tokens compatible with React, iOS, Android, and web-based environments. Fluent 2 also supports Microsoft's various sub brands, ensuring consistent branding and visual language across all applications and products.

Core pillars of Fluent 2 include:

• Cross-platform consistency: A unified look and feel across devices and OS environments
• Design tokens: For spacing, color, motion, and typography, enabling scalability and brand adaptation
• Flexible theming: Built-in support for light and dark mode, including dark mode customization, high contrast, and custom branding
• Accessibility-first: Components and documentation are designed to meet WCAG standards and ensure inclusive design
• Component libraries: React-based Fluent UI components, with a dedicated React library, that plug directly into Microsoft products like Teams, Outlook, and Azure

Fluent 2 is not only an internal Microsoft tool — it’s also open source, so teams outside Microsoft, including development teams, can use it to build consistent, accessible enterprise-grade UIs and contribute to its ongoing improvement.

Why it’s inspiring:Fluent 2 goes beyond flat design systems by focusing on adaptability, accessibility, and cohesion across large, complex ecosystems. It reflects Microsoft’s vision of inclusive, human-centered product design at scale.

And now, when you saw the most popular design systems examples, you may have already started considering how to establish yours. Here are the key steps to building a design system:

How to Create a Design System

Building a design system from scratch might sound overwhelming, but breaking it down into key steps makes the process much more manageable. Here's how to get started:

1. Define Your Visual Design Language

Start by establishing a consistent visual language — this becomes the foundation of your design system by identifying the key design elements that will form the basis for all modular UI components. Focus on these four core elements:

• Color: Choose 1–3 primary brand colors that represent your identity and are versatile enough for various UI components.
• Typography: Select fonts for headings and body text. Keep it simple — usually one font family with a few defined styles is enough.
• Sizing & Spacing: Define rules for padding, margins, and layout grids to ensure visual rhythm and balance across screens.
• Imagery: Set standards for illustrations, icons, and photography to maintain consistency in style and tone.

2. Create a Pattern Library

Collect all UI elements currently in use across your product, and consider including UI kits as part of your pattern library to streamline interface development. This includes buttons, forms, navigation bars, cards, etc. Consolidate similar components and eliminate outdated or inconsistent elements to create a cohesive library that reflects your updated brand direction.

3. Document Usage Guidelines

This is what separates a true design system from just a collection of components.

Comprehensive documentation, similar to the human interface guidelines developed by companies like Apple and IBM, sets the standard for best practices and consistency.

Clearly document:

• When and how each component should be used
• Do’s and don’ts
• Variations, states, and responsiveness
• Accessibility guidelines

These rules ensure that designers and developers stay aligned, even as the team scales or changes.

Want to dive deeper into product design? Check out our full guide to building a [product from idea to launch.](product design process)

Final Thoughts

A well-crafted design system is more than just a set of reusable components — it’s a shared language that aligns design, development, and brand identity across an entire product ecosystem. Whether you draw inspiration from giants like IBM’s Carbon or Shopify’s Polaris, keep things lean like Help Scout, or look to design systems from other brands as inspiration or benchmarks, these examples show that the right system can boost consistency, efficiency, and collaboration.

Ready to create your own? Start small, build iteratively, and document clearly. As new technologies emerge, it’s important to evolve your design system to stay current and effective. And if you need help designing a scalable, user-centered system from scratch, Eleken’s experienced team is here to help —reach out for a 3-day free trial and let’s bring your product to the next level.