Design systems have a reputation problem: enormous documentation sites, dedicated teams, six-month rollouts. That version is real, and it is for organisations with forty designers. For a small product it is a way of never shipping anything.
The small version is genuinely small: a token set, roughly a dozen components, and a written rule about when you are allowed to add another one.
Tokens before components
Colour, type scale, spacing scale, radius, shadow. Get those defined and used, and most visual inconsistency disappears before you have built a single component, because the inconsistency was never in the buttons. It was in the eleven greys.
Tokens are also the part that transfers. The same definitions can drive a Figma library, a Tailwind config and a set of packaging artwork, which is how an identity stays coherent across print and screen without anybody eyeballing it.
Twelve components is usually enough
Button, input, select, card, table, modal, toast, tabs, badge, avatar, empty state, navigation. On a studio dashboard we built recently that list covered the entire application, and the in-house developer has since added two views without design input.
The temptation is to build a component for every situation. Resist it: composition from a small vocabulary produces more consistency than a large catalogue nobody can remember.
Document the decisions, not the code
Nobody reads prop tables; they read the code. What is not in the code is why the modal has no close button on mobile, or why destructive actions never use the brand colour. Write those down.
A one-page decision log is worth more than a hundred-page component reference, and it takes an afternoon rather than a quarter.
If you take four things away
- Define tokens first; most inconsistency lives there, not in components
- A dozen components covers most small products
- Composition beats cataloguing every variation
- Document the decisions and their reasons, not the prop tables
Get the next one when it lands.
Questions about anything in this piece? Email me directly.
Next: What a portfolio is actually for
