Notes on design systems at scale

The best brief is the one the client didn't know they needed to write. Our job is to ask the questions that surface it.

How We Think About It

Typography does most of the heavy lifting in a design system. Get the type scale, line-height, and measure right, and everything else becomes easier to compose.

User interviews conducted after launch are worth ten times the interviews conducted during discovery. You're no longer validating assumptions — you're listening to reality.

What We've Learned

User interviews conducted after launch are worth ten times the interviews conducted during discovery. You're no longer validating assumptions — you're listening to reality.

Monorepos aren't for everyone, but if you're shipping a design system alongside multiple products, the tooling overhead pays off quickly in DX consistency.
Component APIs are contracts. Breaking changes have downstream consequences that ripple through teams and timelines. Versioning is not optional once you're at scale.

The teams that move fastest are rarely the ones with the most resources. They're the ones with the clearest shared understanding of what done looks like.

Notes on design systems at scale

The best brief is the one the client didn't know they needed to write. Our job is to ask the questions that surface it.

How We Think About It

Typography does most of the heavy lifting in a design system. Get the type scale, line-height, and measure right, and everything else becomes easier to compose.

User interviews conducted after launch are worth ten times the interviews conducted during discovery. You're no longer validating assumptions — you're listening to reality.

What We've Learned

User interviews conducted after launch are worth ten times the interviews conducted during discovery. You're no longer validating assumptions — you're listening to reality.

Monorepos aren't for everyone, but if you're shipping a design system alongside multiple products, the tooling overhead pays off quickly in DX consistency.
Component APIs are contracts. Breaking changes have downstream consequences that ripple through teams and timelines. Versioning is not optional once you're at scale.

The teams that move fastest are rarely the ones with the most resources. They're the ones with the clearest shared understanding of what done looks like.