Relieve Your Devs
Designers should solve design, frontend has enough on their plate.
By Andrew Yoon.
In the absense of a good design system, frontend developers are left to build out complex style systems or translate incomplete Figma libraries. Its like asking a designer to solve backend problems to get the correct data for their mockups. Maybe that's a silly example but you get the point. Why are we designers burdening frontend dev with very design-y tasks?
Design systems plays a criticala role in unlocking developer and QA velocity, and making everyone's jobs more pleasant by cutting out drudge work. It ensures accessibility is proactively solved, and that considerations are made for new features and minor adjustments. Critically, it separates the style and layout component from what are often very complex codebases, allowing designers to safely work on that portion of code, and not break other things..
Often, it will be a designer that can see how the brand will express itself in the UI and how it might need to evolve over time. And designers, by practice, will have the most refined sense of how UI should be used and strung together. Designers will be the ones pulling from design libraries to rapidly ideate so bad ideas can fail before they ever reach code. Designers will know the places that need extra attention, like fitting a suit, and maybe even create a little sub-system that gives extra fine control for it.
Though there is an upfront cost, and a technical hurdel that doesn't come naturally for many designers, executing this properly will unburden your fronend devs from what many report to be a significant part of their work.