Design Systems vs. Style Guides

Summary: Design systems are a set of standards (like Google’s Material Design or IBM’s Carbon Design System) needed to manage design at scale. Style guides (like content or visual style guides) are just one piece in a design system.

Design systems and style guides are highly related and often confused, but they aren’t the same.

A Parent-Child Relationship

Design systems and style guides both capture certain guidelines, principles, and visuals for creating interfaces or other designs within a company, product, or service. They allow UX professionals and developers to design and develop with visual consistency that otherwise would be challenging to produce and maintain at scale.

Their main distinction lies in their depth of complexity and relationship to each other. Design systems and style guides take the form of a parent-child relationship . The design system is the “parent” — it contains different smaller pieces, including style guides. Style guides, pattern libraries, and component libraries are the “children” that collectively make up a larger design system.