Design System Setup

Who it's for

Startup and scale-up teams — design leads, frontend leads, PMs — drowning in design debt: five button colors, every screen custom-designed, every PR reinventing components, and endless PM / design / engineering debates about spacing. Or teams that shipped a design system nobody adopted and is now rotting.

What you get

A six-step SOP to build (or rescue) a design system end to end:

• Inventory & audit — see the real current state: how many button, color, and spacing variants actually exist.
• Tokens first — set the semantic token foundation (color, type, spacing, radius, shadow, motion) before building a single component.
• Core component library — built from tokens, not the other way around.
• Design ↔ code parity — treated as a day-1 investment, not a phase-2 nice-to-have.
• Adoption playbook — the part that actually decides whether the system lives or dies.
• Governance — contribution flow, ownership, and a deprecation process.

Why it's different

• Adoption beats component quality 10× — the SOP optimizes for the thing that actually fails, not prettier buttons.
• Tokens before components — so changing the brand primary is one edit, not patching 200 components.
• Single source of truth, or it's not a system.
• "If your DS isn't being deprecated regularly, you don't have a design system — you have a museum."

Good starts

• "Our Figma library is a mess and engineers don't use it."
• "We have 5 button colors — help us build a design system."
• "How do I get design-code parity from day one?"
• "We shipped a design system but nobody adopted it."

Languages

The setup, working steps, and output follow the language you type — usable in English, 中文, 日本語, and other languages the model supports.