Building a Design System: From Tokens to Components

Most design systems start as a component library and end up as a bottleneck. Teams copy components into their own repos to move faster, the library falls out of sync, and you end up with three slightly different buttons across four products. The problem is usually not technical — it's architectural. Getting the foundations right from the start prevents the drift.

Design tokens are the atomic layer: named values for color, spacing, typography, and radius that live in one place and flow outward. Building components before establishing tokens means you'll hardcode values everywhere and refactor forever.