Building a design system that works is a challenge at any scale.

This is the story of how we incorporated illustration into our design system at Booking.com.

Design systems are a crucial part of product development and their benefits are easy to see.

“A screen isn’t necessarily a rectangle anymore…”

For a very long time we had been serving a pretty standard font-stack -  Helvetica, Arial, Sans-serif  - safe in the knowledge that this selection would give us a trouble-free, albeit uninspired, font in which to render our desktop website.

It's Thursday afternoon. For two hours, a group of designers from different teams at Booking.com get together in one of the meeting rooms in our Amsterdam office, furrow their brows, and drink phenomenal amounts of coffee. The meeting's purpose?