At Vander Studio we rebuilt a design system used by four product teams. These are the decisions that mattered most.
Start from real screens
We collected every screen in production and grouped repeated patterns before designing a single component. The audit showed eleven different buttons doing the same job.
Tokens before components
Colour, spacing and type tokens were agreed with engineering first. Components built on shared tokens stayed consistent across web and mobile without extra work.
Documentation is the product
Every component shipped with usage notes, do and don’t examples and a named owner. Adoption grew because teams trusted the system to be maintained.