The graveyard of design systems is full of Figma files that never made it to production. Beautiful component libraries with pixel-perfect spacing, documented in Notion, presented in Confluence, and never actually used by the engineers building the product.
The gap between design and engineering is where most systems die. A design system that exists only in Figma is a suggestion, not a system. A system lives in code.
When we build design systems, we start with CSS variables and component architecture, not visual mockups. The tokens come first: colours, spacing, typography, motion curves. These get defined in code, and the visual design follows the constraints.
This is not designer-hostile. It is reality-friendly. The best design systems are the ones where a developer can build a new page without opening Figma. Where the system is so well-defined that the right answer is obvious.
Ship the tokens. Ship the components. Ship the documentation inside the codebase, not beside it. A design system that ships is worth a hundred that look beautiful in a presentation.