What is the best way to organise Figma to reduce storage issues?

Hi! I’m creating a design system in Figma using all the new component properties and lesser variants but I’m still running out of storage in this DS file (and I still have more items to add to it).

As per Figma articles one should divide their large files into smaller ones. In my past experience I faced storage issue with my project file when it didn’t have a lot of stuff but then I read somewhere that it was due to the heavy DS file I had added as a library at that time.

My question is if let’s say my DS has 20 components, and due to storage issues I divide them into 2 files (10 components each), now the other designers would anyway have to add these 2 files in their project files as libraries to have access to the whole DS.

  1. Will this approach really help with the storage issue for the other designers?
  2. Is there any other way to organise better?

The main issue with “heavy design systems” is not large quantities of components but large quantity of variants of a single component. When a single button component contains 500 variants, all 500 variants will be imported when you use a single instance of this button.

Also check out this article: How to rescue your Figma file from the depths of hell and live to tell the tale

Thanks for the reply @Gleb! :smiley:
I agree that less variants is the way to go!

BTW by your experience what would you say is the optimal way to organise Figma for a full fledged design system? All big companies have humongous design systems but sadly I couldn’t find any information how they manage it in Figma. I don’t think they’d be able to fit everything in 1 file. :thinking:

One approach is to have one Figma file for a single component. Not many do that (but some large companies with large design systems do!) but I think it’s a pretty good approach for maintenance, scale and performance. Other approaches are basically variants of that, where you have a small group of components per file that are related to each other, e.g. inputs file would contain buttons and input fields, etc.