About the Atlassian Design System
Learn about the design system, the benefits of using it, and our values and principles.
The parts of the design system
The Atlassian Design System is a collection of design guidelines, foundations, tools, and components. It is built and supported by Atlassian developers, designers, and content designers. It's used internally by Atlassians, Marketplace partners, and other external users.
Foundations
Create engaging user experiences with foundations. These include our tokens, guidelines, and visual styles: color, spacing, typography, and more.
Components
Combine reusable building blocks to meet specific interaction needs and create consistent user experiences.What people say about the design system
Benefits of using the Atlassian Design System
1. Scalability across apps
The design system makes it simpler to scale. Centralized, reusable, and dependable components align designers and developers, ensuring consistency and quality.
2. Efficiency to build and maintain apps
Designers save time using prebuilt elements, while developers build more efficiently with reusable code. This makes fixing or updating apps post-launch quicker and easier.
3. Consistency of brand and design
Consistency is key to great user experiences. Our design system standardizes patterns and components, ensuring a unified experience across platforms and devices.
4. Preservation of design decisions
When knowledge isn't documented, teams risk losing it during staff changes. Our design system stores all design decisions in a centralized, accessible place.
5. Effective knowledge sharing
With clear documentation, teams can onboard quickly, collaborate better, and align on guidelines easily. Our design system acts as a central resource for all design decisions.
Our vision
Our vision is to be the cornerstone of crafting quality user interfaces in Atlassian apps. We're on a mission to make it easy for teams to design, develop, and deliver high-quality Atlassian UI.
Our values
Our values drive us to create things that are foundational, harmonious, and empowering to use.
Foundational: We solve common problems and provide a foundation for teams to build on. We avoid consistency for the sake of consistency and reject infinite flexibility.
Harmonious: Our building blocks work together to create apps products that feel familiar, cohesive, and part of a family. We build trust through consistency and purpose.
Empowering, for everyone: We strive to make our design system accessible to work for everyone who relies on it, regardless of discipline their role, experience, or skill level, or tenure. By enabling as many making it easy for more people as possible to use the system, we expand multiply our impact.
Our principles
Our principles guide our actions to align with our values.
1. Trusted fundamentals before comprehensive patterns
- We solve common foundational problems first, enabling teams to focus on whole product experiences.
- We provide opinionated building blocks, allowing designers and developers to compose complex experiences that remain distinctly Atlassian.
- We build with heart and balance, ensuring quality through research and clear standards for accessibility, responsiveness, and enterprise scale.
2. Meet system needs before delivering individual features
- We don't stop at shipping — documentation, support, tooling, and maintenance are part of a harmonious experience.
- We bring in many perspectives to shape our design language.
- We finish what we start before starting something new. We're informed by continuous feedback.
3. Bring people on the journey before helping for the moment
- We bring teams and products apps into our process to build trust, share understanding, and co-create solutions.
- We prioritize the best service experience. We provide the right amount of resources, support, and context.
- We optimize for self-service. We help teams make decisions independently and with confidence. We want everyone using our system to become a design system champion.