Most design systems are libraries of components arranged by someone who left the company a year ago. They worked once, on the marketing site, and then they slowly drifted out of sync with everything around them. We built ours differently because we were tired of rebuilding ours.
A working system is a contract between three groups of people: the designers who set the visual language, the engineers who give that language a runtime, and the operators who use it to ship pages. If any of those three loses trust in the system, the whole thing collapses.
The single most useful constraint is to make the system smaller than you think you need it to be. We aim for fewer than thirty primitives. Anything else is a composition.
Written by the Shefa team. Notes, corrections, and disagreements welcome at hello@shefa.agency.
