c/design-system-stories

A dev at a coffee shop in Austin said our design system saved his weekend.

He was trying to build a new feature fast and our component library's clear props kept him from having to write custom CSS. How do you measure that kind of time saved across a whole team?

2 comments

miller.paul•1d ago

Serious question, has anyone else tried to build a design system with just one designer?

I was the only designer on a project for a small startup in Austin, and I decided to build a full design system in Figma from scratch. I thought it would make things faster in the long run. I spent about two months making all the parts, like buttons, cards, and text styles, and wrote down all the rules. The big surprise came when I handed it off to the two developers. They were totally lost. They said the system was too big and they didn't know where to start. I learned that a design system isn't just a box of parts you build alone. It's a shared language, and if the other people don't help build it, they won't know how to use it. Now I'm stuck trying to get them to use it. Has anyone else had a team not use the system you made, and how did you fix it?

2 comments

grant.kevin•1d ago

Just realized I was overcomplicating our component library

Honestly, I used to think every button needed 10+ props for every possible state. After our project in Austin last quarter, a junior dev showed me her simpler version with just 4 core props, and it cut our build time by 30%. Ngl, I was totally wrong. Has anyone else found that fewer options actually made your system more useful?

2 comments

noahw53•1d ago

Warning: Our old way of building button styles was a total mess

We used to have a separate CSS file for every project, and our primary button had 14 different hex codes across the apps. Last quarter, we built a core library in Figma with just 3 button variants. The change happened after a new dev spent a full day just trying to match a hover state. Has anyone else had to clean up a similar color sprawl, and what was your fix?

2 comments

the_diana•2d ago

Update: I just checked our old component library and found 47 different button styles

I was cleaning up our shared Figma files from last year's project and decided to count them. It was a mess of slightly different colors, paddings, and border radii that no one ever cleaned up. This happened because three different teams were building features without checking the design tokens first. Has anyone else had to do a big cleanup like this, and how did you get everyone to stop making new versions?

2 comments

dakota_rodriguez•2d ago

Trying to get our devs to use the new button styles was a total mess

Our team spent 6 months building a Figma library with 12 button variants, but the devs kept building custom ones because the docs were just a PDF. I finally made a simple HTML/CSS sandbox they could copy-paste from, and adoption went from 10% to 80% in a month. Has anyone else found a better way to bridge the design-to-code gap?

2 comments

joel280•3d ago

The week our design system's naming convention completely fell apart

We had to rename over 200 component variants after a new dev argued 'button - primary - large - disabled' was 'objectively bad'... Has anyone else had to rebuild their token structure from scratch?

2 comments

nathang67•4d ago

I finally hired a consultant to audit our design system and it cost us $5,000

Our team was fighting over component naming and our Figma library was a mess. We brought in an expert for a week to review everything. She pointed out our button variants had no clear logic and our spacing scale was all over the place. The report was brutal but we needed to hear it. Has anyone else brought in outside help to fix a broken system?

2 comments

ninam86•6d ago

Spotted a perfect design system in the wild at the Denver airport

I was stuck on a long layover and noticed all the wayfinding signs used the same typeface, arrow style, and blue color, making it super easy to navigate a huge place. It made me think about how our own component library could use that kind of strict consistency for icons. Has anyone else found inspiration for their system in unexpected public places?

2 comments

the_holly•6d ago

Serious question, has anyone else had a design system audit go sideways?

We did one for a client in Denver last quarter and it uncovered a dozen different button components. The lead dev just looked at the report and said, 'We built a forest, not a system.' How do you even start to clean that up?

2 comments

the_val•8d ago

Can we talk about how we treat design tokens

I spent months building a huge token library in Figma, but a dev on my team in Austin asked me to just hand over the raw JSON file last Tuesday. Has anyone else had their process questioned like that?

3 comments

uma896•9d ago

Just hit 500 components in our Figma library and it feels... weird

We started our design system for a healthcare app in 2022 with maybe 20 basic buttons and inputs. Now we're at 500, including a full set of data viz chart templates. It's a lot to manage and I'm starting to think we might have gone too far with the variations. Has anyone else felt overwhelmed after hitting a big number like that?

2 comments

pipergonzalez•10d ago

Unpopular opinion: Our team's design system overhaul actually slowed us down for a full quarter

I know everyone says a new design system speeds things up, but our experience was the opposite. We spent three months last year rebuilding ours from scratch, aiming for perfect consistency. Before the change, our small team could push a new feature page in about two days using our messy but familiar component library. After the launch, that same task took a week because we had to navigate the new strict rules, update tokens, and file tickets for components that weren't built yet. The breaking point was a dashboard update in January where we missed a deadline waiting for an approved table variant. The system is cleaner now, but that initial 3-month period was pure friction. Has anyone else faced a major productivity dip right after a system launch, and how did you get past it?

2 comments

jason_chen•10d ago

A client meeting in Austin last month finally made our button variants make sense

Honestly, we were showing a new dashboard and the client kept asking why some buttons looked 'urgent' and others didn't. Ngl, our old system had like 8 button styles with no clear rules. Right there, I sketched out a simple 3-tier system (primary, secondary, ghost) based on what action they triggered. We rebuilt the component library around that idea the next week. Has anyone else had a client question totally reframe a core component for the better?

2 comments

beth_anderson•12d ago

Our design system went from a PDF to a live site and it changed everything

For about two years, our team's design system was a 50-page PDF living in a shared drive. It had all the right parts, but nobody used it because it was a pain to find anything. A designer would ask, 'What's the hex for our primary button again?' and we'd all just shrug. Six months ago, we moved the whole thing to a simple internal website built with Zeroheight. Now, you can search, copy code snippets right from the page, and see live component examples. The change was huge. In the first month after launch, our dev team reported a 30% drop in questions about basic styles. It stopped being a dusty rulebook and became a tool people actually open every day. The big shift wasn't the rules themselves, but making them easy to get to. Has anyone else seen a simple format change make that big of a difference for adoption?

2 comments

beth_anderson•15d ago

Appreciation post: Our team in Chicago fought for a single button component last month, and everyone said we were overthinking it.

We spent 3 sprints merging 12 different button styles into one flexible version, and now our devs say it's cut their component build time in half. Has anyone else had to push back against the 'just make a new one' mindset?

2 comments

the_caleb•16d ago

My lead designer told me to build the tokens first, and I should have listened

We started our design system for a new fintech app in January, and I was all about building components first. My lead, Sarah, kept saying 'get your color and spacing tokens sorted before you touch a button' but I thought that was overkill. Two months in, we had to change our primary blue for accessibility, and I had to manually update 47 different component files. It took our team three full days to fix everything. Has anyone else learned this the hard way, or am I the only one who ignored the obvious advice?

2 comments

olivia_anderson67•17d ago

I saw a city's public transit app that felt like five different teams built it

I was in Chicago last month and tried to use their Ventra app to check bus times. The buttons, colors, and even the spacing felt different on every screen, like there was no shared plan. Has anyone else had to fix a design system after a project has already grown like that?

3 comments

parker_patel60•17d ago

Our old component library was just a folder of random Figma files

Two years ago, our team in Chicago had a 'design system' that was basically a shared drive with 50 different button styles. I spent a week just trying to find the right card component for a project. We finally switched to Storybook six months back and built a real library with actual versions. Now we have one source of truth and my devs don't hate me. How did you guys handle the jump from chaos to something you can actually use?

2 comments

wendy_clark•18d ago

Spent $3k on a custom icon set that never got used

Our team built a whole component library around it, but the visual direction changed six months in. Now it's just a folder on a server. Anyone else have a big design system purchase that became shelfware?

2 comments

the_shane•19d ago

Warning: I found out our design system's button component was used in 87% of our projects, but only 12% of those uses matched the intended spec.

I pulled the data from our component tracking dashboard yesterday, and it shows most teams are overriding the core styles instead of using the variants we built. Has anyone else seen this big of a gap between adoption and correct usage?

2 comments

mark_fisher48•20d ago

I used to think a full design system was overkill for our small team of 4.

We built a basic button component in Storybook last quarter, but our forms still looked messy because everyone coded inputs differently. After our lead dev spent a full day fixing a simple date picker bug across 12 pages, we finally agreed to add form controls to the system. Has anyone else seen a big time save after adding just one more component type?

2 comments

caleb191•21d ago

I finally got the button spacing right after a month of tweaks

Our design system had a rule for 8px between buttons, but it looked wrong when one was an icon. I spent four weeks adjusting the spacing logic for mixed button groups before it felt balanced. Anyone else get stuck on a tiny spacing rule for way too long?

2 comments

emery_jenkins•23d ago

Pro tip: Naming our design system's color tokens took three months of back and forth

We started with 'primary' and 'secondary' but then needed shades for alerts, disabled states, and dark mode, which spiraled into endless debates over names like 'neutral-700' versus 'gray-cool-mid'. It finally got solved when our lead dev made a script to map every old hex code to the new system after a full quarter. Anyone else get stuck for ages on something that seems simple at first?

3 comments

wright.nora•24d ago

Our design system had 47 shades of gray before we fixed it.

The Figma file was a mess, like someone just kept making new color styles every week. After our lead designer left for a job in Austin, we audited everything. Found out we had 47 different grays, from 'gray-10' to 'neutral-cool-mid'. Has anyone else had to do a massive color cleanup like that?

3 comments