A design system is not just for big companies

A design system sounds like something a bank needs. Fifty designers, a governance committee, a Storybook nobody reads. The small-team version is much simpler, and it pays for itself on the second page you build.

What it actually is

• Tokens. Your colors, type sizes, spacing steps, corner radii and shadows, each with a name. Twenty to two hundred values in a text file.
• Components. Button, card, section, navigation, footer, form field. Each one built once, used everywhere.
• Rules. Two pages of plain English: what the highlight color is for, when to use the dark band, how headlines are written.

Why it matters at three pages

The third page you build is where drift starts: a slightly different blue, a button that is two pixels taller, a heading in the wrong weight. Each is invisible on its own. Together they make a site feel cheap.

With tokens, there is no "slightly different blue". With components, the button is the button. With rules, the next person, or the next AI session, makes the same choices you would.

How we set one up

We start in Claude Design, where the system is visual and the client can react to it, then mirror it into code so the website, the app and the email templates read from the same file. When the brand changes, one file changes.