Figma on Figma: How we built our website design system | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)
Figma built its website design system to address inconsistent pages, duplicated solutions, and a difficult maintenance process. By auditing existing patterns, consolidating visual styles, and creating reusable components in Figma and Contentful, the marketing team established a flexible system that supports consistency without limiting creativity. The result is faster production: teams can move from concept to a live page in as little as one day, often without writing new code. ## Taking Inventory - The team cataloged existing fonts, sizes, colors, layouts, column widths, and other visual patterns in a shared Figma file. - This revealed: - Repeated patterns that could be unified - One-off components that did not belong in the style guide - Large page elements that could be broken into smaller reusable parts - The team applied an atomic approach, combining small “atoms” and “molecules” into flexible page “organisms.” - Similar but inconsistent elements were standardized: - Twelve heading sizes became H1–H3 styles - Body and technical text received defined styles - Long-form content gained pull-quote and block-quote styles - The refined components were organized into a shared library so even people unfamiliar with Figma’s brand could create cohesive pages. ## A Simplified, Flexible Design System - In about a month, the team created a robust style guide and component library integrated with Contentful. - The system standardized: - Typography - Spacing and padding - Line heights - Colors - Grid behavior - Designers could assemble pages from ready-made building blocks rather than recreating common elements. - Frequently paired elements and complete sections were turned into larger reusable components called “FLEGOs,” combining Figma and LEGO. - These components were designed to work together in many combinations, supporting different content and page layouts. ## Faster Marketing Production - Most of Figma’s core marketing site now uses the design-system framework. - Contentful allows the team to build and publish pages without requiring new code for each page. - A product marketer and web producer created the “What’s New” page by: - Wireframing with FLEGOs - Collaborating on copy in Figma - Building the final page from CMS components - The page went from idea to launch in under 48 hours, demonstrating how reusable components accelerated the process. Figma’s experience shows that a website design system should be both standardized and flexible. Auditing existing work, consolidating repeated patterns, and making components accessible through design and content tools can improve consistency while significantly reducing production time.