Design system projects fail in a predictable way. A team with real momentum spends four months building a comprehensive library, ships it, and discovers that adoption requires a rewrite nobody has budget for.
For a team of under fifteen, the correct system is much smaller than the industry literature suggests.
Start with tokens, not components
Colour, type scale, spacing and radius, defined once and referenced everywhere, will fix more inconsistency than any component library. They are also nearly free to adopt: a find-and-replace, not a refactor.
Components come second, and only for patterns that already appear three or more times in production.
Documentation is the product
An undocumented component is a component that will be rebuilt by the next person who needs it. We write the usage rules, the states, the accessibility requirements and the "do not use this for" cases — and we keep them next to the code, because a system documented in a separate tool is a system that goes stale.
Written by the Astral Turbines team.
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