Design Systems March 17, 2026 Cristhian Luna
Designing a Component Library from Scratch
Lessons learned building a design system used across five products.
Start with Tokens
Design tokens are the foundation. Define color, spacing, typography, and shadow scales before writing a single component.
Build Primitives First
Box, Text, Stack, Inline — these layout primitives compose into everything else. Get them right and the rest follows naturally.
Accessibility is Not Optional
Every interactive component needs keyboard navigation, focus management, and ARIA attributes. Test with a screen reader before shipping.