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Systems Diego Marín · 21 July 2026

Building a design system a team will actually use

Most design systems die in a Figma file. Here is how we get engineering, brand and product pulling on the same components from week one.

Building a design system a team will actually use

A design system is not a component library. It is an agreement about how a company makes decisions. If nobody agreed to it, it does not matter how beautiful the buttons are.

We start every system with a one-page contract: the tokens, the two people who own them, and the rule for adding a new component. That page is worth more than a hundred polished screens.

Ship the ugly version first

The fastest way to lose a system is to spend three months perfecting it in isolation. We ship a rough version in week one, with real screens using it, and let the friction tell us what to fix.

Adoption is the metric. Not coverage.