Stratpix
Design Systems & Platform

Reference Design Systems

Maintained by IBM, Atlassian, Shopify, Salesforce, Microsoft

Mature, fully public enterprise design systems worth reading as reference architecture for tokens, governance, and documentation.

Open Reference Design Systems

Why it matters

When you are building a system, the hardest problems are governance and documentation, not components. These are the best public examples of both solved at scale.

Key principles

  1. Every mature system documents contribution and deprecation processes, not just components.
  2. Token layering - primitive, semantic, component - is what makes multi-brand theming possible.
  3. Content and writing guidelines belong in the system; inconsistent microcopy is as visible as inconsistent spacing.
  4. Publish accessibility status per component so consumers know what they are inheriting.

Resources

Foundations, principles, tutorials, community Figma files, icon sets, and templates.