The Power of Nested Symbols in Design Systems (Video)

The other morning I spent some focused time implementing components in our corporate design system Sketch library. As I explored different ways of building the components, I quickly realized a highly effective pattern of creating a 'root' (or default) symbol, and building the variations based on the root.

The Benefits

Why would I do this? Well, here's a few of the benefits:

1. Faster, more reliable symbol editing since everything is based on the root version.
2. Consistency across the component variations.
3. Layout sizing is defined once, and works as expected for all variations.

There are likely far more benefits than this, but the clarity that's brought because of the consistency is powerful

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