A design system for a team of four
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7 min
You do not need a hundred components. You need tokens, eight patterns and a rule about who may add a ninth.
Design systems have a reputation for being something only large companies can afford. The opposite is true: a small team benefits most, because every hour spent re-deciding a button is an hour it does not have.
One page, eight components, one rule
The version we ship with most product projects fits on one page: colour, type and spacing tokens, eight components, and one rule — nobody adds a ninth without removing one or writing down why.
Lumen Ledger rebuilt 140 screens in eleven weeks on that page. Their engineers stopped asking how things should look; the system answered for them.