Product
7 min read

Design systems for companies of eleven people

You do not need a hundred components. You need twelve that nobody is tempted to override, and a naming convention your next hire can guess.

Twelve is usually enough

Button, input, card, tag, avatar, modal, table row, nav item, tab, tooltip, empty state, toast. A small team will use these every day and almost nothing else. Everything beyond the twelve should have to justify its existence.

Tokens before components

If colour and spacing are named, a component can be rebuilt in an afternoon. If they are not, every component quietly hard-codes a slightly different grey, and the system becomes a museum of near-misses.

An override is a bug report

When somebody detaches a component, they are telling you the component was missing a variant. Treat it as feedback rather than as a violation, and the system stays used instead of becoming something people route around.

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