7 March 2026 · 4 min read
Ship it as code
A Figma library with no corresponding component package is a suggestion. Engineers will rebuild from screenshots and the system will drift within a quarter.
Tokens should flow from design to code automatically, or they will diverge.
Fewer components, better documented
Twenty well-documented components with clear usage guidance beat eighty undocumented ones. Coverage is not the goal; adoption is.
Document when not to use a component. That guidance prevents more misuse than the usage docs prevent.
Fund the maintenance
A design system without an owner decays. Someone needs to review contributions, handle version upgrades, and answer questions.
If nobody owns it, treat it as a one-off style guide and set expectations accordingly.
Where to go from here
If you are weighing design system work for an upcoming project, the useful next step is usually a short scoping conversation rather than a longer article. Bring your constraints — budget, timeline, existing systems, and the team you already have — and the decision usually resolves itself in an hour.
We run these as a fixed-scope discovery session with a written recommendation at the end, including the cases where our advice is that you do not need us.
Working on something like this?
Send us the brief. We will tell you what we would build, what we would cut, and roughly what it costs.
Talk to us