Building with Intent: Applying Atomic Design in Design Systems

We read Atomic Design in our book club, and everyone nodded along — “Oh yeah, this sounds like good thinking.” But the meaning of atomic design truly came to life when we started building Base UI and designers were asked to design with Base UI in mind.

Designing products that scale isn’t just about creating beautiful screens — it’s about creating a system that’s flexible, reusable, and consistent. That’s where Atomic Design really shines.

What is Atomic Design?

Coined by Brad Frost, Atomic Design is a methodology that encourages us to break down interfaces into small, reusable pieces — much like elements in chemistry. It’s a structured way of thinking that helps you move from the tiniest UI elements all the way to fully functional screens.

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The model consists of five levels:

• Atoms – basic building blocks like buttons, labels, icons, text styles, and inputs.

• Molecules – combinations of atoms that form small functional units, like a search input with an icon and label.

• Organisms – more complex, reusable sections of the UI such as navigation bars, cards with charts, or sortable tables.

• Templates – page-level layouts made up of organisms and placeholder content.

• Pages – fully fleshed-out templates with real content in context.

Atomic Design isn’t just theory. It’s a practical framework for creating design systems and product interfaces that are easy to build, scale, and maintain.

Atomic vs. Ad Hoc: A Tale of Two Design Processes

Let’s walk through how Atomic Design can transform your design process. Imagine you’re building a dashboard. Here’s how things might unfold — with and without Atomic Design.

🧪 With Atomic Design

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1. Start with atoms
   You begin by checking whether foundational components like buttons, text styles, and inputs already exist in Base UI. Instead of creating from scratch, you leverage color, spacing, and typography tokens for consistency.

2. Combine atoms into molecules
   You build simple UI units like a search field, button + icon pair, or user avatar with name. If a molecule is used across multiple products, it may be worth contributing it to the Base UI library. If it’s one-off, you can compose it from existing atoms and use it locally — without bloating the system.

3. Build organisms
   Create more complex reusable patterns like cards with charts, sortable tables, or filter panels. This is where teams often get tempted to componentize too early. In the old Base UI, we ended up with overly rigid organism-level components that only worked for a specific use case. Now we ask: “Is this pattern used in multiple places across the org?” If not, keep it local and assemble using atomic parts.

4. Assemble templates
   Lay out the structure of your page using organisms and placeholder content. This gives teams a shared idea of layout without requiring finalized content yet.

5. Apply real content to pages
   Swap in real data and copy to complete the user experience.

✅ Why this works: The immediate benefit is reduced redundancy that leads to easier design-dev collaboration. In long-term, the company can maintain consistent design language while supporting faster scaling and updates.

🌀 Without Atomic Design (Ad Hoc Approach)

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1. Design the full page first
   Designers jump straight into Figma and build a screen from scratch. No defined structure, just a lot of creativity and improvisation.

2. Style everything manually
   Every page has slightly different buttons; there is no consistency in spacing; repeated patterns (e.g. modals, tables) are recreated over and over with slight inconsistencies.

3. Handoff to engineering gets messy
   A lot more time is suck into creating handoff documents and developing components, which cannot be leveraged by other teams; QA starts flagging inconsistencies across the product

🚨 Why this hurts: Every new screen feels like starting over, which no one likes to do. Design debt builds up fast and it becomes a nightmare to maintain the UI consistency across all products becomes difficult.

Atomic Design and Design Systems: Where It Fits

When building or evolving a design system like Base UI, Atomic Design helps clarify what belongs in the system — and what doesn’t.

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• Atoms and molecules are the reusable core.

• Organisms are potential library additions — if they’re common across multiple use cases.

• Templates and pages stay product-specific, built by composing the smaller parts.

One common misunderstanding is that everything reusable must become a component. That’s not true — and over-componentizing can make a system hard to navigate and maintain. The key is intentionality: if a pattern is useful for multiple teams and aligns with your design principles, componentize it. Otherwise, build it locally.

🚧 Common Pitfalls to Watch Out For

Merging WHAT to build vs. HOW to build it

Too often, designers identify a user problem and jump to UI inspiration from competitors — skipping foundational thinking. Atomic Design is about how to construct your solution — it doesn’t dictate what to build. Focus on solving the user problem at the experience level, but the wireframing starts with the design system in mind.

Designing pages too early

Some teams approach the Shared Tech team with fully designed screens and ask for new components to support them. The problem? These new requests often don’t align with our component framework or are too specific. A better approach is to engage during early wireframing — when atomic thinking can actually inform design decisions.

Being too rigid

Atomic Design is a framework, not a checklist. The design system isn’t the whole product — it’s a toolbox. Designers should still creatively solve user problems by assembling components in new ways. Think Lego, not Ikea.

Over-engineering the component library

The earlier version of Base UI suffered from this. We had large, complex organism-level components that only worked for one team. Everyone else struggled to adapt them.

The fix? Follow the single responsibility principle. Components should do one thing well. If a card component has layout, interactivity, and content logic all baked in — it’s too tightly coupled. Instead, build smaller parts that teams can compose flexibly.

💡 Tips for Making Atomic Design Work in Real Teams

• Start small: Get your atoms and molecules right first.

• Clarify component hierarchy: Not everything needs to be in the system — focus on what’s reusable and widely needed.

• Collaborate early: Designers and engineers should align on how complex components are assembled. Something that looks simple might be technically tricky.

• Use it as a guide, not a rulebook: Atomic Design is meant to help you build faster — but only if you start with it in mind. Don’t try to retrofit atomic thinking after everything’s already designed.

🧭 Conclusion: Why Atomic Design Still Matters

Atomic Design gives teams a shared mental model for how to build — not what to build. It’s a simple philosophy with big benefits: consistency, clarity, scalability, and easier maintenance.

But like any good system, it only works when used intentionally. That means resisting the urge to over-componentize. It means asking: “Is this pattern useful for more than just this project?” It means involving your design systems team early — not just when you need a component.

Atomic Design works because it mirrors how we actually build: from the smallest units to the big picture. It gives teams the foundation to move faster, stay consistent, and create better products together.

And in a world full of complexity, that kind of simplicity is still one of the most powerful tools we’ve got.