← Back to InsightsDesign · April 08, 2026 · 4 min read
Design Decisions That Compound
A design system is not a Figma file. It is a set of small, opinionated decisions that get applied a thousand times across a product. The best ones disappear into the work.
Design
If you find yourself naming buttons "primaryButton2" or shipping the fourth shade of teal this quarter, you don't have a design system — you have a museum.
The compounding ones look like: one type ramp, eight spacing tokens, four button variants, two surface colors. That's it. Everything else is a workaround.