From zero to a design system in production in three months
A fully functional design system, custom-built by Belka around your product, your team, and your roadmap.
Immediate results, with the design system applied to your next feature or sprint, while in development.
Includes hands-on training and coaching for 3 to 12 months.
From €30K
Trusted by fast growing scaleups and established industry leaders
Having a pre-built library of components means designers and developers can save up to 80% percent of the time it takes to develop new features.
More than just a collection of components, a design system is a tool to help teams stay on the same page, communicate better, and make good decisions faster.
By making your design language consistent, a design system improves the consistency of your user interface, making your product easier to navigate.
- Do you want to ship faster?
You’ve got an ambitious roadmap, but you’re stuck. Design and development are not aligned, delivery is slow, and your team spends a lot of time reworking the same components. A design system would help. - Is your team too busy?
Focusing on building the product is your team's top priority, and your backlog is already full. A design system would help, but you can’t afford to divert your resources. - Do you lack experience?
There’s a reason most teams’ first attempt to build a design system fails. It’s hard. You need help from someone who’s got experience helping teams build and implement them. - Do you worry about wasting time?
You could hire someone to build you a library of components, you know that by itself that won’t get you very far. You need to make sure the design system is built with your product in mind, and that your team will adopt it from day one. - Is your product team growing fast?
In theory, a bigger team means you can ship faster. But if your team members aren’t on the same page, miscommunication might actually end up slowing you down.
Belka understood Subito’s team and our way of working. They created a tool for us that we use every day, and really feels like it’s ours.
When product teams decide to build design systems, their first attempts almost always end in failure. Almost always for the same reasons.
In 2023, Belka conducted in-depth interviews with product design teams at 27 companies in Europe and N-America that have digital products at the core of their growth strategy.
Of all the things we learned from talking to these designers, developers and managers, the most surprising was how many told us that their first attempts at building a design system had ended up in failure.
And almost always for the same reasons: they lacked experience, they picked the wrong tools, their designers and developers didn’t know how to communicate, and more. (We’ve written about some of them on our blog.)
The "Start a Design System Practice" service is designed to help companies avoid these mistakes, and start unlocking value from their design systems faster.
The 5 pillars of a successful design system
Everything from your design components themselves to the tools used to build, manipulate, organize and maintain them. This also includes the skills your team needs to master working with them.
A design system should have a purpose. To be useful, it must be grounded in the realities of your product. Vision means that the priorities and goals for your design system are aligned with your product goals.
A design system doesn’t govern itself. You need a set of rules and processes that help your team figure out things like who contributes, who takes responsibility, and who decides.
A design system isn’t just Figma files and Storybook. It’s a set of practices and processes that are actively being used in your organization. Adoption is about making sure your design system is actually being used.
Creating a design system takes time and resources, and it must deliver a return on that investment. The Value pillar is about how you measure results, and how you communicate the value of your design system.
Start in four steps
First, we take an in-depth look at your product’s interfaces and product libraries. Getting a sense of the current state of the product helps us understand your pain points, and figure out how to structure the design system to fit your needs.
We do a workshop with your team, looking at your needs through the lens of the 5 pillars. This will help us understand how the design system supports your product and business goals, who should care about it, and what components to prioritize.
We start with the foundation, documenting typography, colors, spacing, icons, and other elements that form the basis of the component library. Then we design and code the components, starting with those that will most useful for your team and your product in the next months.
To ensure the successful adoption of the design system, we coach your team while they use it to build the next feature, supporting them with practical, weekly or bi-weekly sessions. You do the work, we review it, give advice, answer questions, and provide hands-on help whenever it’s needed, until your team has confidently taken ownership of their new design system.
As the project advances, your team slowly takes over more and more responsibility for your design system.
What you see is what you get
We built your design system based on the needs of your product. We work with you to choose the components based on your product roadmap, and we test them on the actual interfaces of your product.
We do the hard thing: design and code components in the framework of your choice, ready for your team to plug into their design and development process.
While Belka builds the design system, your team continues working on the product. Step by step, we integrate the design system practice into your development cycle, without your team losing a day of work, with hands-on coaching until the team takes full ownership of the design system.
None of us had any experience with building a design system. Without Belka’s help it would have taken us three times as long and we’d have made three times as many mistakes.
Questions? Answers!
Here are some situations where a design system might be the right thing for you:
- You need to rebuild part of the product or migrate the product to a new framework
- You want to grow your digital product by integrating new features and team members without compromising the delivery time
- You need to implement a rebrand, adapting all product interfaces to a new color palette or typeface quickly and consistently, and you're unsure of the best approach
- You want address inconsistencies across the interface, where some parts of the product differ significantly from others, leading to a poor user experience and resulting in low user satisfaction or brand perception
At Belka we believe that theory does not exist without practice and that a design system that is not applied to your product features is not a successful design system, because it does not really allow you to build interfaces quickly.
Belka helps you beyond the creation of the components, supporting you in the integration of the design system into your product, and in the adaptation of the components, in order to:
- Give you components that are ready to be used tomorrow
- Give you the knowledge and ability to correctly integrate new components into the design system in the future
You will see all stages of the project up close and be actively involved in decision-making on the design system, from start to finish. There is a weekly meeting to make decisions and keep the project moving forward in a healthy way.
This service provides for precise involvement at each stage:
- In the initial analysis phase, when faced with possible inconsistencies in the product, we will ask you for help in understanding which direction to take in terms of component styling
- In the component design phase, we will ask you to help decide which components to design and develop, and to test the components we are building to see if they match your requirements
- In the development phase, to ensure consistency with your development standards, we involve you in reviewing the product code
The full package.
- Components: The Design and development of a comprehensive component library, custom-built for your product. All the asset and tools you need to deliver faster.
- Support and mentoring: Belka’s experts will be there to support your team during the design and development of your product’s next feature.
- Adoption: Clarity on practices, roles, and responsibilities. Your team will know have everything they need to maintain and develop the design system.
- Roadmap: A roadmap of application of the design system on the product based on your priorities.
- A way to measure ROI: A methodology to measure the impact of the design system on the interfaces and on the product.