2025
Pocket design system
Thirty components and one set of tokens, sized for a three-person product team.
- Role
- Design systems, front-end
- Year
- 2025
- Focus
- Design systems, CSS, Accessibility
Why small
A three-person team doesn't need a design system with a governance board. It needs the twenty things they build every week to look the same and work with a keyboard, without anyone maintaining a second product.
What's in it
- Tokens for colour, type, spacing and radius, written once as CSS custom properties and mirrored into the design tool.
- Thirty components, each a plain HTML pattern with a stylesheet — no framework required, so the marketing site and the app share them.
- One page of rules: when to use a dialog, when not to, and how errors read.
What changed
New screens went from a week of back-and-forth to a day or two, and the accessibility audit that had found forty-odd issues found four — all in code written before the system existed.