Product designer at a fintech. I built our design system alone, and I'm writing about the systems I use to keep shipping without burning out. Berlin.
Your design system will be used by people who do not read documentation on purpose. They read it at 10 p.m. when something is broken. Write it for that moment.
A button is a component. A login screen is a pattern. Most failed design systems are failed because the team tried to make components out of patterns.
A design system does not need ninety tokens on day one. It needs twenty. Here are the twenty I actually shipped, and why I stopped there.
Spending a week reading your own product is the single highest-value thing you can do before building a design system. Here's how I did it, and what I found.
