Building Ente's Design System

It's been over 6 months since I joined Ente as a designer. Long before actually working on a design system, they have always been something I'd admire from a distance. I used to scroll through Behance and Dribbble, at awe how clean and satisfying everything looked. The moment I started actually building one, things fell apart fast. Edge cases I never considered started showing up everywhere. I'd go back to fix something and realize the fix only worked if I ignored three other things. The Ente design system went through more iterations than I'd like to admit. I had no idea what I had no idea about, but eventually, I started understanding why design systems that are actually used in production look so "boring".

It started with Ente Locker. I was given complete freedom, visual, UX,…