Design systems are easy to start and hard to keep alive. The ones that scale across surfaces and teams share a few common properties — and avoid a few common mistakes.
Tokens first, components second
If your tokens are wrong, your components will fight your designers every release. Spend disproportionate time on the colour, type, radius, spacing and motion tokens before you build a single component.
Components are contracts
A button is not pixels — it is a contract. Variant, size, intent, state, loading, disabled, full-width. Once you treat components as contracts, theming and white-labelling become trivial.
Where AI plugs into your design system
- Generated empty-state copy from a single intent tag.
- Automatic accessible-name suggestions for icon-only controls.
- Linting design tokens against actual product usage.
- Refactor recipes for legacy components.
