Cultivating content design systems

Starting the work of designing and creating a content design system is like planting and tending to a fruit tree sapling that is tiny now, but will eventually yield an abundant harvest. The saying goes that the best time to plant a fruit tree was years ago, but the second best time is now 🌱 🌳 🍎

Setting the strategy for, designing, and creating a content design system is a huge project, even if your team has a dedicated content design ops person. It may seem so overwhelming that you don’t even know where to start. You may think a basic style guide is good enough for now and not want to devote time and resources to componentizing content.

But creating modular, reusable content components will pay huge dividends by helping you scale consistent, high quality content creation. Your team’s content governance decisions will be preserved for easy reference and they won’t have to spend as much time combing through Figma files looking for examples.

Moving from a basic style guide to a content design system is never going to happen overnight. It requires a lot of research, planning, and dedicated time for execution, iteration, and driving adoption within your org. But it’s good to always be moving incrementally—at a glacial pace, if that’s all you can do within the limits of the team capacity you can devote to content design ops—from a style guide mindset to a design systems mindset.

If your team can’t spare much time for building content components right now, do a trial run by building just one or two and seeing how useful they are for content designers, UX designers, and devs. Creating error message or empty state patterns and components is a great place to start, because most content design teams create a lot of them and they’re great candidates for templatizing and componentizing. Every component you create moves your content design practice a little closer to automation and greater efficiency.

It’s also a great idea to do some dot voting with your team and design partners, to see what types of content components they’d find most valuable. Then build an initial component or two, keep tabs on who’s using them and how often, and use that to make the case for devoting resources to building more. Plant that fruit tree now 🍎 🍏