2026-06-20
Tokens first, components second
The highest-leverage artifact is not a component library — it's a token set: colors, spacing, typography, radii and shadows defined once and consumed everywhere. With tokens, even ad-hoc screens stay coherent, and a rebrand becomes a variables change instead of a quarter of work.
Compose, don't enumerate
Small teams drown when they try to catalog every possible component. Instead, build a small core (buttons, inputs, cards, overlays) and compose everything else. If a design needs a component that doesn't exist, that's a signal to review the pattern — not to grow the library on demand.
Design and build in one place
The Figma-to-code gap is where design systems go to die. When the people building the system also implement it — as we do on UI/UX engagements — drift is caught in review, not in QA six months later. One source of truth, whichever artifact you treat as canonical.