Every design system I’ve inherited had a beautiful component library and no rules. Three teams used the same button in three different ways.
At Tessel we started with a document instead of a Figma file: forty short decisions, each one sentence long. ‘A page has one primary action.’ ‘Status is one of five words.’
The components came later and were almost boring to build, because the arguments were already settled.
If your system is drifting, don’t add components. Find the decision nobody wrote down.
