Design systems that survive the second year
Design systems are usually judged at launch, when they are complete and consistent by definition. The real test is eighteen months later, after a rebrand, three new page types and a developer handover.
Scope it to what you actually ship
Systems built as an exhaustive component library take months and then get bypassed for the one component nobody anticipated. Start with what your real pages need and grow it under pressure.
A small, genuinely used system beats a comprehensive, partially adopted one every time.
Tokens are the contract
Colour, spacing, type scale and radius should exist in one place and be consumed everywhere. The moment a hardcoded value appears in a component, the system has a leak.
Semantic names — surface, muted, accent — survive a rebrand. Literal names do not, and renaming them across a codebase is where systems usually die.
One set across marketing and product
When the marketing site and the application use different systems, the buyer's expectation and the user's experience diverge. That gap shows up as churn in the first week of a trial.
Sharing tokens is usually enough; sharing every component often is not worth the coupling.
Document intent, not just usage
Record why a component exists and when not to use it. Usage examples alone lead to components being applied in situations they were never designed for.
Keep the documentation in the repository next to the code. Documentation that lives elsewhere goes stale within one quarter.
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