Design Systems as Code
Feb 2026
Advertising creatives shouldn't fight their tools. They should have systems that behave like code: versioned, reusable, and consistent. That's the premise behind design systems for advertising — and it's what we built with Brand Lockup.
In engineering, design systems (tokens, components, patterns) have been standard for years. Design in Figma, implement once, ship everywhere. The same pattern that made frontend teams 10x more productive. In advertising — especially in regulated industries like pharma and financial services — we still see bespoke builds, duplicate review chains, and creative that can't be reliably scaled or optimized. Every campaign is a new build. Every variation is a new request.
The gap
Marketing ops teams are drowning in one-off requests. Variations multiply: 12 markets × 8 channels × 3 formats = 288 assets, and someone is hand-crafting all of them. Compliance and MLR add friction. The result: slow time-to-market, inconsistent brand expression, and no capacity for real testing and learning. You can't A/B test when every variant is a bespoke build.
The fix isn't more tooling. It's structure. Design systems that encode brand rules, component logic, and approval workflows. Content that's composed, not copied. Build once, assemble many. Pre-approve the primitives; let creatives focus on what's distinct.
Behave like code
What does "behave like code" mean? Version control. Branching. Reusable primitives. Automated validation. Design tokens that cascade — change the primary blue, and every component updates. Components that inherit — a hero is a hero whether it's for email or social. The creative output stays human; the system behind it is deterministic and scalable.
When design systems work, creatives get more space for the work that matters. The plumbing — resizing, reformatting, compliance checks — becomes infrastructure. That's the future of advertising at scale. And it's the same pattern that will matter for AI: when brands encode their identity into structured systems, agents can assemble on-brand content without hand-holding. Design systems as code today; agentic brand systems tomorrow.