A design system is not a component library. It is an agreement about what the product is allowed to look like.
The libraries are the easy part. The hard part is the decisions the library encodes — spacing, colour, tone — and the discipline to say no when a new screen wants an exception.
What we ship
We build systems small on purpose: tokens first, a dozen components, and documentation written for the engineer who joins next year.
- Design tokens in code, not in a Figma file.
- Components with accessibility built in, not bolted on.
- A changelog people read.
A system that nobody can break is a system nobody will use.
Studio note
In practice
We keep a running document of these decisions for every client, so the next designer — in-house or external — inherits reasons, not just files.
