Content design system sustainability: practice over projects

The best content design systems aren't just collections of files. They're sustainable systems that have the potential to level up content design as a field.

When you’re creating content governance tools, try to think of what you’re doing as initiating a practice rather than completing a project. Projects—even large ones—are typically time limited, and usually focused on a specific deliverable. Design system practices do prioritize the creation of tangible artifacts, but importantly, they’re made within a sustainable framework focused on processes, methods, and standards that support long-term collaboration, maintenance, and iteration.

Sustainability is a key characteristic of healthy content design system practices. Sustainable content design systems are:

🤝 Collaborative: they improve collaboration between content designers and other design partners and stakeholders.

💫 Designed with an eye toward future-proofing: they’re designed to be updated as the visual design system evolves, design trends shift, and user needs change. They can also adapt as AI takes a more prominent role in content design.

✅ Easy to update and maintain: they’re housed somewhere where they can be easily updated, and content designers are able to make at least basic updates without having to enlist a UX designer. Multiple content designers are ideally involved, so the system doesn’t fall apart if one transitions to a new role.

♻ Focused on process: they emphasize the continuous process of researching, creating, maintaining, testing, and iterating on content components over a static end product.

💻 Designed with onboarding in mind: they’re great tools for helping new content designers acclimate to the org’s content guidelines, learn more about the visual design system, and become new content design system advocates!

📋 Subject to frequent user testing and research: their content designers do research (whether formally or informally) to make sure that the users (their design partners) aren’t encountering usability problems. If users can’t find what they’re looking for, or if the documentation is unclear, outdated, or incomplete, adoption will drop. Finding ways to improve adoption should be a consistent process of incremental improvement.