The Hidden Cost of Skipping a Design System

"It's just a small site, we don't need a design system" — we hear it constantly. We used to say it ourselves. Then we counted the cost.

Inconsistency tax

Without a system you end up with five button styles, three shades of grey and four ways to space cards. Users feel it, even if they can\'t articulate it.

Slower future changes

Want to update the brand colour? Without tokens, that\'s a manual hunt through every component.

A "system" can be one CSS file

You don\'t need Storybook and a Figma library. A short list of colour, spacing and font tokens in one CSS file is a system.