A design system is a collection of reusable components, guidelines, and standards that can be used to create a scalable and consistent user interface and user experience across digital products. It allows teams to work more efficiently and effectively, saving time and resources and ultimately delivering a better end product.

Design systems are becoming increasingly popular as more companies discover the benefits of having a standardized and streamlined approach to design and development. For this reason, introducing a design system can be a game-changer for any company's digital presence.

However, not all design systems are created equal, and adopting an existing one can be daunting.

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, there are three ways to approach this: adopt, adapt, or create. While creating a new design system from scratch can be costly and time-consuming, the adapt approach can be challenging if the design system is not customizable to your specific needs.

This is where Bento comes in, a tailor-made design system that can easily adapt to any digital product in seconds.

Let’s dive in and understand what Bento is, how it adapts to different scenarios, and what may be some of its possible actual use cases, showing how it can benefit anyone looking for an effective design system that's easy to use and highly customizable.

Bento, an adaptive design system

Bento is a general-purpose design system not limited to a specific company or industry. It is focused on web technologies, using React and Figma to power its capabilities.

It is profoundly customizable, and it combines the ease of implementation and cost savings of an existing design system with the adaptability and versatility of a tailor-made one. With Bento, you can focus on the design and the experience rather than countless hours creating a design system from scratch.

Bento's most robust feature is its seamless alignment between design and development teams. The design and development processes are fully integrated, with unified patterns that reduce development time and eliminate the communication gap between designers and developers.

Another important aspect of Bento is its strong focus on accessibility. The system is designed with accessibility in mind, following best practices for each component to ensure a wide range of devices can use it.

If you want to know more about Bento, read this article Making of Bento DS: An Interview With Gabriele Petronella.

Flexible and versatile

Drawing upon our years of experience in the software development industry, we have created Bento as a culmination of buildo collective know-how.

With its inherent versatility, Bento has proved to be a valuable tool in designing applications across a range of B2B and B2C markets. From healthcare to banking and finance, Bento has been successfully utilized in various sectors to deliver effective and tailored design solutions.

With Bento, you can build complex interfaces with interconnected flows and a significant amount of data without compromising usability, making them easy to navigate and a pleasure to use.

Customizable without losing coherence

Bento allows you to choose the best approach according to your needs of brand differentiation, cost containment, and time management.

Bento comes with a pre-built basic theme that you can use immediately and offers customization options for critical design elements like colors and typography. Additionally, Bento allows in-depth customization of each component to align with your brand's visual identity, thanks to its atomic nature. Changes made to foundational design elements are cascaded throughout all components, ensuring consistency and cohesiveness across the entire design system.

It’s not really possible to lose coherence between components, also because the robust set of foundations on which Bento relies are exposed to both designers and developers, making it easy to build components on top that look and feel like they were first-class citizens of your design system.

Bento grows with your business

Bento is designed with adaptability in mind. While it's true that Bento is highly customizable, it's not a static solution that can't be changed or adapted over time. In fact, Bento is precisely engineered to be flexible and adaptable, with a range of features and customization options that can be adjusted as your needs evolve.

Whether you're looking to make minor tweaks to your existing design or create a new look and feel, Bento's adaptability means you can modify and evolve your design system over time without starting from scratch again.

With Bento, you can rest assured that your design system will continue to meet your needs even as your business grows and changes.

You don’t need a design department

Bento is designed to be highly customizable and adaptable to different use cases and needs. In fact, one of the critical benefits of Bento is that you don't necessarily need a dedicated design department to use it effectively. Whether your organization has well-established design guidelines or is just starting to develop its visual identity, Bento can be tailored to fit your specific needs.

Even companies without a design department can benefit from Bento's flexibility and ease of use.

For example, many customers we worked with did not have an internal design department, so we collaborated with an agency to develop a visual identity that we then used to set up the foundations.

In other cases, customers already had existing designs, so we could modify the components and integrate the capabilities of Bento while maintaining the current design.

This level of adaptability and flexibility makes Bento an ideal solution for companies who want to enhance their existing design processes or create new designs that adhere to established brand guidelines.

Ready to use

One of the key advantages of Bento is that it offers a range of customization options, allowing you to tailor the design system to your specific needs. However, for those who simply need a reliable and accessible design system that can be implemented quickly and easily, Bento also offers a plug-and-play solution.

Bento comes with a modern and polished theme right out of the box, making it an ideal choice for companies that want to improve their design without the hassle of building a custom solution from scratch.

With Bento, you can implement a stylish and functional design system in your applications in minutes, allowing you to focus on other essential aspects of your business.

What makes Bento set up so fast?

To make the graphic setup of your design system as seamless as possible, we have created a step-by-step guide that provides guidance and support throughout the entire process.

The first step is to select the key colors of the theme and adapt them to your design needs, then create a color palette from them. You will then assign colors to role tokens, such as interactive elements or data visualization. This process is handled by a designer using the Figma file that comes with Bento.

Our suite of tools helps you through the more long and error-prone operations by making customization fast and effortless. Using our plugins and automation, you can create branded color palettes, import your brand iconography, and hand off the theme to development.

You can contact us for consulting if you don't have a designer on your team. Thanks to our expertise, we take your visual identity as input, and in a few days, we will give you back a ready-to-use DS.

Cool also for enterprise

Bento is suitable for small to medium-sized businesses and enterprise-level projects with complex interfaces that handle large amounts of data. Bento's atomic design approach and high level of flexibility are valuable in such cases, enabling designers and developers to build complex interfaces that remain easy and enjoyable.

Conclusions

In conclusion, Bento DS empowers design teams to easily create beautiful and functional interfaces, whether you're looking for a basic, out-of-the-box theme or a fully customized experience tailored to your brand. With its atomic design approach, Bento provides flexibility, scalability, and consistency across your digital products, making it an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes.