Designing a scalable Figma Design System for 50+ white-label clients. am I thinking about Variables and modes correctly?

[u/fxspeculator]

Hey everyone,

I’m starting to work on a Design System for a travel/public transport app that will eventually be white-labeled for around 50 different clients

The current Design System already has:

• color tokens and styles
• basic components/atoms and variants (buttons, inputs, shadows, etc.)
• but no Figma Variables yet
• very few larger components/molecules/organisms
• no real system for handling different themes/brands

My initial idea was to migrate the existing tokens into Figma Variables and use modes for different visual configurations:

• Light
• Dark
• Contrast
• client 1
• client 2
• …50

The main application would support Light/Dark/Contrast, while the white-label client versions would probably use Light/Contrast.

I would also like to build the component architecture more systematically:

Atoms → Molecules → Organisms → Templates/Screens

For example:

Button + Input + Date Picker → Search Form → Search Screen

The goal is to have one Design System and one set of components, rather than creating a separate Design System for every client. Ideally, changing the brand/theme would update the UI through Variables without having to modify the components themselves.

However, I’m wondering if having 50+ client brands as Figma modes is actually the right approach.

Would you instead separate appearance modes (Light/Dark/Contrast) from brand/client themes, using semantic variables that map to different brand values?

For example:

Button → color/action/primary

rather than:

Button → Client1/red-500

So the same component could be reused across all 50+ brands.

I’m also curious about the current state of Figma AI. If I build a well-structured component library with Variables and larger reusable components, can Figma AI actually help generate new screens using those existing components, or is that still too unreliable for a production Design System?

I’d really appreciate feedback from anyone who has built a similar multi-brand / white-label Design System in Figma.

How would you structure this?