Design systems in 2025: AI, flexibility and community
Remember when design systems were just glorified style guides? Those days are long gone. In 2025, design systems have evolved into dynamic ecosystems that blur the lines between designers, developers, and AI assistants, fostering creativity rather than stifling it.
As digital products grow more complex, design systems have become the critical infrastructure that enables consistent, accessible experiences at scale. But the most successful systems aren’t just component libraries—they’re living ecosystems that evolve alongside your organization.
Atomic design grows up
Brad Frost’s atomic design methodology continues to provide the foundation for modern design systems, but with a crucial difference: adaptability has become paramount. The rigid structures of yesterday have given way to flexible frameworks that can bend without breaking.
Companies like Spotify demonstrate how atomic design can scale across multiple platforms while maintaining brand identity. Their approach allows controlled variation within a cohesive system—proving that atomic design can evolve beyond its initial rigidity.
For growing businesses, this means starting small with core components and patterns, then scaling organically as your product matures—without the overhead of maintaining a system that quickly becomes outdated.
How did design systems become community projects?
The most significant shift in design systems has been the move toward community-driven development. What began with open-source systems like Material Design has evolved into rich ecosystems where designers and developers collaboratively build in the open.
Figma’s collaborative features have transformed design systems from siloed internal tools to shared resources that benefit from collective intelligence:
- Over 65% of Fortune 100 companies now maintain public design systems
- Community contributions to open systems increased by 240% in two years
- Teams with community-driven approaches report 30% faster implementation
Organizations like Salesforce (Lightning) and IBM (Carbon) don’t just make their systems public—they actively foster communities around them, accelerating evolution far beyond what internal teams could achieve alone.
NL Design System shows us the way forward
The Netherlands’ NL Design System represents one of the most ambitious implementations of an open, community-driven approach. Created to standardize interfaces across Dutch government services, it demonstrates how design systems can drive large-scale digital transformation.
What makes NLDS particularly valuable is its federated approach—providing a framework that allows each organization to maintain brand identity while sharing common patterns and accessibility features.
Key lessons from NLDS that apply across industries include balancing central oversight with distributed ownership, creating clear contribution pathways, treating documentation as a product, and building accessibility into the foundation rather than as an afterthought.
Design tokens become the new superpowers
The evolution of design tokens is revolutionizing how design systems scale in 2025. What began as simple variables for colors and spacing has transformed into sophisticated systems that enable real-time theming and truly responsive design across platforms.
Modern token systems now support complex relationships between values, enable contextual adaptation based on user preferences, and bridge the gap between design tools and development frameworks.
Companies like Shopify use advanced token systems to power thousands of storefronts with unique branding while maintaining structural consistency. Their Polaris system shows how tokens enable personalization at scale—a key competitive advantage.
AI becomes your creative partner
In 2025, AI has transformed from documentation assistant to creative collaborator. Modern systems leverage AI to generate component variations, ensure accessibility compliance, identify inconsistencies, and translate design to code with unprecedented accuracy.
Microsoft’s recent Fluent Design System overhaul showcases this integration. Their AI tools help teams maintain consistency while accelerating production—automatically generating responsive variants, suggesting localization adjustments, and predicting how changes might affect performance.
For businesses, design systems are no longer just efficiency tools—they’re creative partners that enhance human capabilities rather than simply documenting them.
When do rules help creativity?
Despite technological advances, the fundamental tension remains: how to maintain consistency without stifling innovation. The most successful systems in 2025 embrace this tension rather than trying to eliminate it.
Airbnb exemplifies this balance. Their system provides strong patterns while explicitly defining “zones of creativity” where teams are encouraged to experiment. This approach maintains cohesion while enabling innovation in key areas.
The companies seeing the most success view design systems as facilitators of creativity rather than restrictive rulebooks. They use constraints as creative catalysts, offer simple patterns for common needs with more complex options for edge cases, conduct regular system audits, and maintain clear feedback channels.
Building for an adaptive future
As we look toward the latter half of the 2020s, design systems continue evolving toward flexibility, intelligence, and community collaboration. The next frontier appears to be truly adaptive systems responding not just to different devices but to individual user needs and contexts.
For businesses investing in design systems today, building with this future in mind means:
- Choosing tools that embrace openness and extensibility
- Investing in token architectures that evolve with your needs
- Building community around your system
- Leveraging AI as a partner in creation and maintenance
- Balancing standardization with room for exploration
The systems that will thrive won’t be the most comprehensive or rigid—they’ll be the ones that evolve most effectively while enabling teams to create better products, faster.
The most successful design systems of 2025 have become almost invisible, quietly enabling consistent, accessible, and delightful experiences at scale.
Anastasia Gritsenko
Working Machines
An executive’s guide to AI and Intelligent Automation. Working Machines takes a look at how the renewed vigour for the development of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Automation technology has begun to change how businesses operate.
