How I Became a Systems Designer
The skills that shaped my career
Hey, I’m Ness. I’m a systems design specialist, and if you’ve landed here, you’ve probably seen something I’ve written or shared — whether that’s through nessgrixti.com, redesigningdesign.systems, or one of the resources I’ve created about systems thinking. If not, welcome aboard!
I’m gonna dive straight into a couple of the questions I’m asked most often:
“How did you get into design systems?”
Closely followed by:
“Can you teach me how to become a systems designer?”
I do my best to share what I’ve learned through articles, templates, frameworks, tactics, case studies and the book I wrote about creating components, but the truth is, I wasn’t formally trained in this space. There wasn’t a course or a single job title that led me here. Instead, it’s the result of years spent working across disciplines—design, development, communication, and strategy. That all shaped how I think, work, and collaborate.
There are faster paths now. But if you’re aiming to be a great systems designer, the honest answer is: there’s no shortcut. The best systems people I know didn’t follow a linear route. They built their skill sets around curiosity, system thinking, and a deep understanding of how cross-dicipline teams function.
My Career
Now, am I going to pass up the opportunity to write this like it belongs on someone’s Wikipedia page? Definitely not. So here we go:
The early days
I started out as a designer in the more traditional sense. I worked across graphic design, web design, print design, email design, and marketing. I’ve designed everything from social banners to newspaper ads to brand guidelines to internal dashboards.
What stood out to me early on wasn’t just the design work itself — it was the systems behind the work, which I attributed to my skillset in front-end development. What made certain products feel consistent? Why were some teams in sync and others all over the place?
I first started working with design systems in Sketch back in 2016, before ‘Design System’ was as common a term used in Product Design. Here, I started accidentally building out early component libraries, aligning styles, and trying to wrangle consistency before tooling caught up with the work. As Figma matured and became more widely adopted, I transitioned there too. That shift unlocked a whole new level of collaboration and scalability.
Over time, I moved into more digital and product-focused roles. I began building reusable and scalable components that could be leveraged across multiple products and teams. That was the turning point: from designing screens to designing the systems that made those screens possible.
Eventually, after oscillating between product design and systems I realised I was less interested in the end result in feature work and more focused on the architecture behind it. How teams collaborate, how tools connect, how decisions are made. That’s when I knew systems design was where I wanted to stay.
My Skillset
Design systems sit at the intersection of many disciplines, and the most effective systems designers I know tend to have fairly diverse backgrounds. Here’s how mine came together:
Design
Design is where I began, and it remains at the core of my thought process. I’ve worked across:
- Graphic and print
- Web and UI
- Marketing, brand, and comms
- Product and UX
This range taught me how to think at scale, and that a component is only as good as the system that supports it. It also made me appreciate visual clarity, hierarchy, and accessibility as not just “nice to have” but essential foundations for good systems.
Front-End Development
I’m not an engineer, but I’ve written enough HTML and CSS to know what makes something usable, scalable, and maintainable.
That ability to bridge design and development has helped me build trust, solve edge cases, and design realistically, not just aspirationally.
Problem Solving
This is a big one—and probably the most underrated skill in systems work. A design system isn’t just a toolkit. It’s a response to deeper business problems.
Whether it’s speeding up delivery, unifying the brand, or improving collaboration between teams, the real work is in identifying what’s broken and designing processes to fix it.
Communication
Systems don’t succeed in silos. Most of my current work is about alignment, facilitation, and storytelling.
Communicating clearly across design, engineering, product, and leadership is often what makes or breaks a system’s adoption.
I’ve run workshops, created training materials, and written countless guides, not just to teach but to make systems feel less abstract, more approachable, and ultimately more valuable to the people using them.
So, how do you become a systems designer?
There’s no single way in, and that’s kind of the point. If you’re curious, here’s what I think matters most:
- Get curious about structure. Why do some designs scale and others fall apart? Why do some teams adopt systems and others resist? Ask questions. Look for patterns.
- Learn enough code to communicate with developers. You don’t have to be an engineer, but understanding implementation makes you a better partner.
- Understand your business. Systems don’t live in design tools, they live in processes, priorities, real organisational needs and, let’s face it, code.
- Practice facilitation. You’ll be leading conversations more than designing solo. Workshops, alignment, buy-in—these are core skills.
- Build context before components. Anyone can design a button. Not everyone can design a system that supports 100 teams that still makes sense six months from now.
Final Thoughts
I didn’t set out to work in systems. I just kept following the friction, eventually realising I was more invested in solving the why than the what.
Now, I work with businesses to redesign how they design and I try to share what I’ve learned along the way, whether it’s through articles, templates or conversations.
If you’re exploring this path, too, I’m glad you’re here. And if you’ve made it to the end of this article, you’re probably already thinking like a systems designer.
