Bulb Shines Bright with Solar as its Design System | Figma Blog

Bulb adopted Figma to create and maintain Solar, a shared design system for its rapidly expanding range of products. The system addressed inconsistencies caused by different agencies, codebases, and design patterns while preserving Bulb’s collaborative culture. By centralizing components and standards in Figma, Bulb enabled designers, developers, researchers, writers, and stakeholders to contribute throughout the design process.

Building a Consistent Design Function

• Bulb’s 13-person design team supports multiple product groups and disciplines.
• Its five or six products had originally been designed and built by different agencies.
• Although Bulb’s visual brand was cohesive, products contained inconsistent interfaces, codebases, and design patterns.
• Establishing a design team from scratch gave Bulb the opportunity to define a unified design system and workflow.

Collaboration Across Disciplines

• Bulb selected Figma because it supported the company’s culture of transparency and collaboration.
• Project pods typically include a designer, researcher, content writer, and developer.
• Non-designers can access files, suggest changes, and stay informed without requiring permission from a designer.
• Engineers and designers use Figma together to discuss designs and verify that work follows shared standards.
• Researchers also use Figma for brainstorming, sketching, and prototyping with designers because its interface is accessible to non-designers.

Creating the Solar Design System

• Bulb wanted a single source of truth for design consistency across its products.
• Figma team libraries allowed changes to master components and styles to propagate across designs.
• The team began by documenting every product page in Figma, creating a visual site map that exposed inconsistencies.
• Designers and other collaborators established design principles to evaluate and normalize components such as buttons, checkboxes, and dropdowns.
• Standardized patterns were gradually rolled out across eight products.

Keeping the System Simple

• Bulb deliberately limited Solar to a small color palette and a modest set of design patterns.
• The team’s guiding principle was to start small and keep the system manageable.
• A more complex design system requires more effort to maintain and can undermine consistency.

Bulb’s experience suggests that a successful design system depends on both the right collaboration tool and disciplined scope. Organizations should begin with a small, shared set of principles and reusable patterns, then expand only when necessary.