The first stage involves either establishing new design foundations or absorbing existing ones. Sometimes, it's as simple as digesting documentation for CSS frameworks like TailwindCSS, Bootstrap, etc., other times it requires building everything from the ground up.
The outcome of that stage is a designer who assimilates the foundations and grasps the entirety of design decisions and their relation to the future code. This accumulated knowledge of the fundamental design setup should give a designer such a degree of fluency, that along the way each teammate can alter the foundations.
Stage 2. Continuous Integration 🏎️ A step that essentially boils down to merging inputs from various designers into a shared repository. In terms of the actual design file, all design platforms are inherently built that way - even with real-time collaboration in a single file - Figma being a prime example.
Thus, the design file becomes a unified source of truth, containing all design decisions made during the process. By that, I mean elements, components, colors, layouts, typography, iconography, design language, patterns, variables, etc. - including subsequent tokenization of everything mentioned above.
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