Product Design Systems That Get Adopted
Tokens, components and the governance that stops the system rotting in month four.
Priya Raghunathan
Product designer · design systems & research
- Accessibility
- Design Systems
- Figma
What you will be able to do
- Build a token architecture that supports theming and dark mode
- Design component APIs that flex without forking
- Write documentation designers and engineers both open
- Run a contribution model that does not bottleneck on you
- Measure adoption and prove the system's value
About this course
Plenty of teams build a design system. Far fewer end up with one people use. This course covers the craft — tokens, component API design, documentation — but gives equal weight to the political and operational work: getting buy-in, handling contribution, and measuring adoption honestly.
Curriculum
3 sections · 9 lessons
- 1Three-tier token architecturePrimitive, semantic and component tokens — and why all three.Preview21 min
- 2Type and spacing scales with a reasonModular scales, and why arbitrary values keep creeping back.18 min
- 3Colour, contrast and dark modePerceptual colour spaces and accessible pairs by construction.23 min
Before you start
- Working knowledge of Figma
- Some experience on a product team
Student reviews
4.5 from 4
Daniel Osei
19 Aug 2026Worth it for the case study alone
The final project is genuinely realistic — messy inputs, ambiguous requirements, the lot. I have already reused the structure at work twice.
19 found this helpful
Sofía Marchetti
19 Aug 2026Finally, the why and not just the how
I have taken four courses on this topic and this is the first one that explained the underlying model instead of walking me through syntax. The section on validation alone changed how I work.
14 found this helpful
Amara Diallo
19 Aug 2026Solid content, pacing is uneven
The first and last modules are outstanding. The middle one felt rushed relative to how important it is. Still recommend it, with that caveat.
4 found this helpful
Ryan Whitfield
19 Aug 2026The quiz actually taught me something
I got two questions wrong and the explanations made the reason obvious immediately. That is a rarer thing than it should be.
9 found this helpful