Custom Solutions Made Easy: How the LSX Design System Adapts to Real-World Needs

One of the ways we use the LSX Design System here at LightSpeed is how we leverage AI tools to enhance the design process. Our team uses AI to suggest font pairings, color palettes, and even tone of voice guidelines based on each brand’s identity. By inputting key brand attributes, we let AI generate tailored design suggestions that align with the overall project goals.

This approach helps streamline the creative process. This ensures that design decisions are consistent with the client’s brand identity from the start. It also allows us to provide faster, more accurate recommendations for global styles and variables. Which can be directly applied to the LSX Design System.

Since launching the LSX Design System on Figma, we’ve seen it adopted by over 1,100 users. Specifically, freelancers, agencies, and even WooCommerce store owners. So why are so many people choosing LSX?

1. Streamlined Design-to-Development Workflow

The LSX Design System reduces the time spent translating Figma designs into WordPress themes. Our design tokens align directly with WordPress variables like those in the theme.json file, ensuring that design decisions are carried through to the final website.

2. Comprehensive Component and Pattern Library

With a rich component library, the LSX Design System makes it easier to build consistent websites. The system includes template parts, templates, and patterns to cover various site sections and page types.

3. Interactive Prototypes

The LSX Design System includes pre-built prototypes for WordPress and WooCommerce sites. This provides polished starting points that are easy to customize without needing extensive technical knowledge.

Fully Interactive Prototypes

One of the standout features of the LSX Design System is its fully interactive prototypes. These prototypes provide users with a realistic, hands-on experience of how their websites will function. For WooCommerce sites, the prototype includes a full browse-purchase-pay workflow. Therefore allowing users to simulate the entire shopping process from product discovery to checkout.

The LSX Design System offers the following prototypes:

• Basic Prototype – Ideal for simple WordPress projects.
• Standard Prototype – Perfect for more complex layouts.
• WooCommerce Prototype – A fully interactive WooCommerce store prototype with a complete shopping flow.

These prototypes are powered by a large collection of controlling variables. This ensures all components, spacing, typography, and colors remain consistent throughout the design. This allows users to adjust global styles efficiently, ensuring that their prototypes align with the final website’s design system.

These interactive prototypes make it easier to visualize the final website, test user flows, and communicate ideas to clients or stakeholders. The prototypes are fully customizable and can be adapted to meet the needs of different projects.

Built for WordPress Block Themes

The LSX Design System is fully compatible with WordPress block themes, making it a future-proof choice for your projects. As the WordPress ecosystem continues to move toward block-based site editing, using a design system that aligns with this philosophy ensures that you’re building websites that are modern, flexible, and easy to maintain.

Unlike traditional design systems, LSX focuses on the specific needs of WordPress users. Whether you’re working with a standard blog theme or a complex WooCommerce site. The design tokens and components in the LSX Design System are tailored to the structure and requirements of the WordPress block editor.

One of the key advantages of the LSX Design System is that all spacing and page structure elements in the patterns align with WordPress defaults. Creating a seamless design experience out of the box. However, the flexibility of the system means that these defaults can be easily customized through variables. Therefore allowing users to adapt the design to unique themes or bespoke projects.

Additionally, the LSX Design System makes it easy to extract variable values using Figma’s Dev Mode. Users can visually refine their global styles — adjusting colors, typography, and spacing — and then export these values directly into a theme.json file for use in their WordPress projects. This process ensures that design decisions made in Figma translate directly into the final WordPress site. Making it easier to maintain consistency between design and development.

By utilizing pre-configured variables for spacing, typography, and layout. Users can maintain a balance between efficiency and creative control. Making the LSX Design System ideal for projects of all scales.

Tour Operator Design System

Following the success of the LSX Design System, we saw an opportunity to create a specialised version for our Tour Operator Block-Based WordPress Plugin. This led to the development of the LSX Tour Operator Design System. You can learn more about in our dedicated blog post: Announcing the New LSX Tour Operator Design System.

We forked the original LSX Design System and adapted it to meet the specific needs of tour operators. This involved stripping out WordPress or WooCommerce elements that were irrelevant to the plugin, while retaining the core variable structure and naming conventions from the original system.

A key addition to this new design system was a Tour Operator-specific prototype. This fully interactive prototype allows users to visualize and test tour-related workflows, including booking processes and destination showcases.

The project took around 6 to 8 weeks to complete, but leveraging the LSX Design System as a foundation significantly accelerated our progress. Without that base, it would have taken far longer to develop a polished, usable final product.

How the LSX Design System Can Benefit You

Here’s a quick breakdown of how users can benefit from the LSX Design System:

• Quickly access pre-built color schemes and typography settings:
  Use the comprehensive variable library to apply consistent styles across your WordPress projects with ease.
• Assemble pages faster with ready-to-use components and patterns:
  The system includes everything from basic components to full-page patterns, allowing users to build pages without starting from scratch.
• Ensure design consistency across projects:
  By using linked variables and text styles, users can maintain consistency throughout their designs, making global updates simple and efficient.
• Visualize your designs in interactive prototypes:
  The fully interactive prototypes allow users to test and showcase their WordPress designs before implementation, reducing back-and-forth between teams.
• Speed up theme development:
  Extract variable values using Figma’s Dev Mode to quickly populate theme.json files, ensuring that your design decisions are accurately reflected in the final WordPress site.

Real-World Example: Deep Blue Adventures

A great example of how the LSX Design System can streamline workflows is Deep Blue Adventures. For this project, we branched the Tour Operator Design System, updated the variables with custom color values and font pairings, and within 30 seconds to a minute, the entire design system reflected the new values.

The interactive prototype updated automatically, allowing the client to see a glimpse of what their site might look like with minimal effort. This process gave the client immediate feedback on the design changes and helped speed up the overall project timeline.

While this example uses the Tour Operator Design System, the same approach can be applied to WooCommerce projects or any general block theme. The flexibility of the LSX Design System makes it an ideal tool for building visually consistent, modern websites with ease.

By leveraging these features, users of the LSX Design System can streamline their workflows, reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, and build modern, visually consistent WordPress websites with ease.

For more information on our Deep Blue Adventures project, read our case study on it here.

For details on agile workflows and community engagement, read our third post in this series:

Want to read the entire series of posts? Read the first post here.