How on Earth Do I make a New Design System from an Existing Cloud Library?

Question

Per the title, this process is mystifying to me.

I have one giant, overwrought document with many artboards. Many of the elements within those artboards were turned into components, text styles, color styles, etc. That collection was then published as a (very sloppy) library which I could bring into other, new docs and pull from.

Now I basically want to start fresh. Have a single, clean library with ALL of the necessary styles and components that can be brought into any new doc I create.

It seems like modifying this existing library is incredibly inflexible, forcing me to use this "+" at the bottom to add bespoke pieces into it - and of those pieces, "component" is inexpicably not an option (only "graphic").

What am I missing? Is the correct process:

Start a new doc
Switch to that old library
Drag everything from that old library into the new doc
Ungroup every single item
Individually select every item and turn it into a new component for the "document assets" library
And then once that's all done everything, re-publish a new library?

That cant be accurate can it? Granted, this is course correction for my very careless initial foray into libaries and components, but I mean it seems like the two options are:

1. Go through the above obnoxious steps; or

2. Clean up the old library (grouping, renaming, etc), but not be able to add components to it unless I add them to the initial overrwrought file mentioned in the first place.

Relative to a Figma or a Sketch, I cannot believe how confusing this seems.

Ansubedi03 · Accepted Answer

Hello Jordan,

First of all I want to let you know there are two types of libray:

- The old library which are traditional ones( where we can add assets from any file, so no main file )

- The new library ie Document library ( which need to be published and has one main file)

So whatever I understood is that you want to convert Traditional Library into Document Libray, because whatever new components you are adding are treated as graphics. Correct me if am wrong.

If I understood you correctly, Then you need to do the below steps:

Start a new doc
Switch to that old library
Drag everything from that old library into the new doc
Old components will drag as main component, so no need to ungroup them
And then publish the library with unique name

Do not delete your traditional library untill you are 100% sue that each and every element has been used.

And let me know what does overwrought document meant, is it a Xd file. If yes, you can publish this file instead of doing all over again.

Please feel free to ask for any confusion.

Regards,

Anita Subedi

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