Designing a beautiful, user-friendly interface (UI) is one thing. Designing it consistently across a massive web or mobile project is a whole different game. The secret? Design systems—a collection of reusable components, rules, and patterns that maintain consistency across a product.

You probably know about the basics of design systems, but let’s level up your toolkit. We’re skipping the usual suspects like Sketch and Figma (you’re probably tired of hearing about them) and diving into some underrated yet powerful tools that make creating and maintaining design systems a breeze.

1. Storybook: Real-time UI Development and Documentation
When you’re building complex components that need to live across various parts of a UI, Storybook is a game-changer. Think of it as a development environment for UI components where you can build, test, and document components in isolation before integrating them into the larger app.

Component Isolation: Develop components in a sandbox environment to prevent weird app-side bugs.
Documentation and Discovery: Storybook generates a dedicated space where teammates can preview and understand components. This is especially helpful when onboarding new developers or designers to a project.

Extensive Plugin System: Storybook offers tons of addons that allow you to build out accessibility checks, design tokens, and theme switching directly into your development process.

Once you set up Storybook in your project, simply run yarn storybook or npm run storybook, and you’ll get a local server that showcases your UI components. Developers can explore various states of components with different props.

2. Chromatic: Visual Testing for Design Systems
Building a design system is one thing, but ensuring it doesn’t break over time? That’s where Chromatic comes in. This tool is an extension of Storybook that provides visual regression testing. It captures snapshots of your components and checks if anything has changed unintentionally.

Visual Regression Testing: It detects pixel-level changes in your design and highlights where your UI might be breaking.

Automatic Publishing: Every time you push to GitHub, Chromatic automatically takes screenshots of your Storybook and updates the published docs.

Collaboration: Teams can comment on changes directly in Chromatic’s UI, facilitating smooth discussions around design tweaks.

No more merging broken UIs into the main branch without realizing it until later.

3. Zeroheight: Design System Documentation for Designers and Developers
Creating the design system is only half the battle—documenting it in a way that's easily accessible is crucial. Zeroheight allows you to document your design system in a way that’s digestible for both designers and developers. It seamlessly integrates with tools like Figma, Sketch, and even Storybook, so the whole team can stay on the same page.

One-Stop Documentation Hub: Designers can sync styles and patterns from tools like Figma, while developers can integrate code examples directly into the documentation.

Live Updates: As you update components or styles in your design tools, Zeroheight syncs the changes.

Real Use Cases: You can attach code snippets, usage guidelines, and interactive demos, all in one place.

It bridges the gap between design and development, making it easier to keep everyone in the loop.

4. Supernova: Design System Management and Delivery
Managing a design system across multiple teams or projects gets complicated quickly. That’s where Supernova excels. It helps you create, manage, and scale your design system across the entire product lifecycle—from design to development.

Code Generation: Automatically generate code from design tokens, so your dev team doesn’t need to convert design specifications manually. Supernova can generate tokens in CSS, SCSS, JSON, and other formats.

Cross-Platform: Supernova helps you manage design systems across both web and mobile. It’s the go-to tool for teams looking to bridge the gap between design and engineering.

Custom Workflows: You can create workflows that tailor to your team's specific needs, whether it's handoff, documentation, or code generation.

It’s one of the few tools designed for design system scaling, not just building.

5. Figma Tokens: Consistent Theming and Design Tokens
Design tokens ensure consistency in your design system by defining values for colors, spacing, typography, etc., in a way that's platform-agnostic. Figma Tokens is an unofficial yet highly recommended plugin that allows you to use design tokens directly in Figma, so your designs are always aligned with your code.

Centralized Design Tokens: Use a single source of truth for all your design variables—spacing, colors, typography, shadows, etc.
Live Synchronization: Once you define your tokens, the plugin allows you to export them to platforms like GitHub or use them directly in your project’s codebase.

Theming: It supports dark mode, light mode, and custom themes out of the box. Simply switch between themes to see instant updates across your designs.

By integrating design tokens into Figma, you can ensure that the design and code are always speaking the same language.

Pick the ones that fit your workflow and start building something truly scalable today.

I hope you found this overview useful! Got any favorite design system tools of your own? Let me know in the comments. 👇