Creating a workspace around your design system

The structure and complexity of design systems vary from company to company. As such, your workspaces setup will depend on how design work and resources are shared across teams within your business.

Centralized design systems

If your company’s design system is managed by a dedicated team and supports multiple products or brands, we recommend you set up an additional workspace for it. This enables team members responsible for maintaining the global design system to organize libraries in a single place that is separate from workspaces for a specific product or brand. Libraries published in a given workspace can be shared across the entire organization and accessed by other workspaces.

In the example below, libraries that live in the Design system workspace are published to the entire organization so that they can be used across all 6 workspaces within the organization. Admins can also set default libraries and pick which ones will be enabled in the assets panel by default.

Image depicting how Acme's design system workplace has assets that can be published to other workspaces including Acme audio, home, and music.

Decentralized design systems

In some cases, companies do not have an overarching design system; instead each product may have its own set of libraries that are managed by their respective teams. In this case we recommend you create a design system team within eachworkspace. By isolating each set of libraries within a dedicated team, admins can more easily manage permissions and access to libraries.

In the example below, each of the four workspaces has a Design system team with libraries specific to that product area.

Image depicting the relationship between different libraries and how they relate to Acme product groups.