Can you explain the difference between design systems and component libraries in the web domain?

The intuitive thought is:

• 🎨 Design System - The designer’s thing, defining style and experience.
• 🧱 Component Library - The developer’s thing, defining user interface components.

🎨 A design system includes descriptions related to brand experience, such as colors, typography, accessibility rules, and tone of voice, similar to brand experience documentation. From the perspective of graphic design, it is similar to focusing on the visual identity (VI) part of a corporate identity system (CIS).

🧱 A component library leans more towards practical aspects, collecting existing user interface patterns and defining them as components: how, why, and when to use or not use that component.

In other words, they should not be distinguished by a specific professional field, but rather by the degree from concept to practical implementation. I also communicate with designers to maintain the overall component library to ensure consensus between both fields.

Finally, what are the benefits of creating this large amount of “documentation”?

1. Consistency: A unified appearance and product experience, allowing for a common language across fields.
2. Reducing repetitive work: Instead of planning a brand new user interface each time, breaking the interface down into reusable components increases efficiency. Not all products should spend time building a design system or component library, but when a product finds its market position and enters the maintenance phase, this infrastructure becomes quite important.

If you want to learn about common user interface patterns or design systems, you can refer to: Component Gallery🔗