Design systems that survive contact with reality

A design system is not a Figma library. It is a shared vocabulary that both halves of the team can
speak without translation.

The failure mode

The design team ships a beautiful library. Engineering builds something adjacent to it. Six months later
there are two systems, and the one that ships is whichever the developer had open.

What actually works

• Tokens first, components second. Colour, space, radius and type scale settle the arguments.
• One source of truth for names. If it is --surface-2 in code, it is surface-2 in Figma.
• Ship it as code. A component that is not installable is a suggestion.
• Version it. Breaking changes need a changelog, not a Slack message.

The test

Can a new engineer build a page that looks right without asking a designer anything? If not, the system
is documentation, not infrastructure.