Member-only story

What’s a Design System, Design Language, and Design Language System? And what’s the Difference?

Maximilian Speicher
The Startup
Published in
5 min readMay 5, 2020

TL;DR: Depending on who you ask, a design system and a design language might be the same thing or not. Regardless, the important point here is that both a system and a language go beyond a simple pattern library. They have to include a set of rules and guidelines to give the included components structure and meaning.

Originally published on 2008 ‒ Tales of Design & User Experience.

Most people concerned with digital design in one way or the other should already have an intuitive understanding of what a design system or a design language is. It’s what Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines are, or Microsoft’s Metro Design Language. I, personally, have heard the term “design language” more often in my career in UX so far, and sometimes “design system”. But a new term I came across for the first time recently was “design language system”. So, I asked myself: Is there actually a difference between these three? What followed was a little literature review of three very useful articles:

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

The Startup
The Startup

Published in The Startup

Get smarter at building your thing. Follow to join The Startup’s +8 million monthly readers & +772K followers.

Maximilian Speicher
Maximilian Speicher

Written by Maximilian Speicher

A designer who writes about leadership, strategy, & anything UX • Doctor of Computer Science • formerly University of Michigan • maxspeicher.com/newsletter

Responses (4)

What are your thoughts?

This is an analytical, yet honest investigation of design systems. The more I study its anatomy, the more I realize how ironic a framework that unifies design standards doesn’t have a singular source of truth for its own composition. And I think…

This is very helpful for me as a junior designer. I feel very confused by all these terms and thanks to your article, now they make much more sense to me. Even though you stated at the end that your are not 100% sure, I still feel more clear because…

I think one problem with this take is the lack of understanding of the idea of a "pattern language" or "pattern library". The idea of design patterns come from the famous Christopher Alexander et al. book, A Pattern Language (see…