I’m working on building a design system that can work for multiple clients with different branding. The main challenge is figuring out how to quickly swap out brand elements like colors, fonts, and styling when we get a new client.
Right now my approach is pretty manual. I create a base design system without any specific branding, then I make a copy of the whole file for each new client. After that I go through and update their specific brand colors, typography choices, corner radius values, and other styling elements. This gives me a separate design system file for every brand we work with.
I’m wondering if there’s a better way to handle this workflow. Has anyone else dealt with creating flexible component libraries that can easily switch between different brand guidelines? I’d love to hear about any tools or methods that make this process smoother.
Variable-based theming has completely transformed how I handle multi-brand projects. Rather than maintaining separate files, I structure everything around CSS custom properties or design variables that can be overridden at the theme level. The trick is building your components with this flexibility in mind from day one. I maintain a single source of truth for all components, then create brand-specific override files that contain just the values that differ between clients. When starting a new project, I simply link the appropriate brand override and everything cascades down automatically. This approach has cut my setup time from hours to minutes. The biggest lesson I learned was to abstract more than you think you need initially. Things like shadow styles, animation timing, and even layout spacing often vary between brands in ways you don’t expect until you’re deep into a project.
I’ve been dealing with this exact problem for the past two years and found that design tokens are the game changer you’re looking for. Instead of manually copying entire files, I now maintain one master component library and create separate token files for each brand. Each token file contains all the brand-specific values like primary colors, font families, spacing scales, and border radius settings. When I need to work on a project for a different client, I just swap out the token file and the entire system updates automatically. The initial setup takes some time because you need to structure your components to reference tokens instead of hard-coded values, but once it’s done the time savings are massive. I use Figma’s variable feature for this workflow, though there are other tools that handle tokens well too. The key is being disciplined about using tokens for everything from the start, even values that seem like they’ll never change.