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Deep dives into design thinking, creative process, and the intersection of business and aesthetics.
A design system is how you stop paying twice for the same decision.
Smaller organisations tend to assume design systems are for companies like Airbnb or IBM. At their size it sounds like overhead: we're too small for that, we just need to move fast.
I think that gets it backwards. A large company has the people to absorb some inefficiency. A busy marketing team can't. If you're rebuilding the same buttons and sections every time you launch a landing page, the missing system is what's slowing you down.
Inconsistency is a cost you pay on every project
Without a system, small decisions get made again and again, slightly differently each time. A developer guesses the padding on a button, the designer spots it, and three emails later it's fixed on one page but not on the others. The sales deck is set in Arial and the website in Inter, so a prospect who sees both meets two slightly different companies.
When every new page starts from a blank canvas, a campaign that should go live in days takes weeks. None of these would be worth a meeting on its own. Added together they're design debt, and the interest builds until the team spends more time fixing than publishing.
For most SMEs, a kit of parts is enough
A smaller organisation's design system doesn't need its own documentation website, just a set of parts defined once and used by everyone who builds pages:
A type scale of five or so sizes, from the main heading down to body text.
Primary and secondary colours, plus the functional ones people forget until they need them, like red for an error and green for a confirmation.
A library of core components: buttons, cards, form inputs and navigation.
Spacing rules on a defined grid, an 8px system for example, so elements line up without anyone nudging them.
Assembling a page instead of designing one
Say the marketing team wants to test a new offer. Without a system, they brief a designer, the designer mocks it up, a developer builds it from scratch, and a couple of weeks go by. With one, someone picks a hero block and a feature grid from the library in Framer or WordPress, adds the copy, and it can be live the same day. The brand holds up because those blocks were approved once, and nobody pays design and development to repeat work.
Put the system where pages get built
We build the design system inside the tools the site runs on. In Framer that means components and global styles for text and colour: change the blue once and it changes on every page that uses it. In WordPress we use block patterns, so instead of a blank editor your team gets a library of branded sections that are hard to break by accident.
One person changes it, everyone else uses it
Governance sounds heavier than it is. Anyone can use the components, and only the design lead can change one. That second rule is what stops the one-off exception: someone bumps a heading up two sizes on a single page because it looked better there. One of those does no harm. Let enough of them pile up and you don't have a system any more, just a set of pages that used to match.
That only works if approval is quick. If a request to change a component sits for weeks, people work around it.
Where the time and money come back
Pages go live faster because nobody starts from zero, and there are fewer bugs because each component was built and tested once and then reused. You also stop paying an agency to design the same contact form three times.
To see whether you need one, put five pages of your site side by side and count the button styles, heading sizes and shades of your brand colour. If there are more than you'd have signed off on purpose, you're already paying for the system you don't have.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website and design-system services · XOCEAN digital ecosystem case study · Discuss a scalable design system
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.
A design system is how you stop paying twice for the same decision.
Smaller organisations tend to assume design systems are for companies like Airbnb or IBM. At their size it sounds like overhead: we're too small for that, we just need to move fast.
I think that gets it backwards. A large company has the people to absorb some inefficiency. A busy marketing team can't. If you're rebuilding the same buttons and sections every time you launch a landing page, the missing system is what's slowing you down.
Inconsistency is a cost you pay on every project
Without a system, small decisions get made again and again, slightly differently each time. A developer guesses the padding on a button, the designer spots it, and three emails later it's fixed on one page but not on the others. The sales deck is set in Arial and the website in Inter, so a prospect who sees both meets two slightly different companies.
When every new page starts from a blank canvas, a campaign that should go live in days takes weeks. None of these would be worth a meeting on its own. Added together they're design debt, and the interest builds until the team spends more time fixing than publishing.
For most SMEs, a kit of parts is enough
A smaller organisation's design system doesn't need its own documentation website, just a set of parts defined once and used by everyone who builds pages:
A type scale of five or so sizes, from the main heading down to body text.
Primary and secondary colours, plus the functional ones people forget until they need them, like red for an error and green for a confirmation.
A library of core components: buttons, cards, form inputs and navigation.
Spacing rules on a defined grid, an 8px system for example, so elements line up without anyone nudging them.
Assembling a page instead of designing one
Say the marketing team wants to test a new offer. Without a system, they brief a designer, the designer mocks it up, a developer builds it from scratch, and a couple of weeks go by. With one, someone picks a hero block and a feature grid from the library in Framer or WordPress, adds the copy, and it can be live the same day. The brand holds up because those blocks were approved once, and nobody pays design and development to repeat work.
Put the system where pages get built
We build the design system inside the tools the site runs on. In Framer that means components and global styles for text and colour: change the blue once and it changes on every page that uses it. In WordPress we use block patterns, so instead of a blank editor your team gets a library of branded sections that are hard to break by accident.
One person changes it, everyone else uses it
Governance sounds heavier than it is. Anyone can use the components, and only the design lead can change one. That second rule is what stops the one-off exception: someone bumps a heading up two sizes on a single page because it looked better there. One of those does no harm. Let enough of them pile up and you don't have a system any more, just a set of pages that used to match.
That only works if approval is quick. If a request to change a component sits for weeks, people work around it.
Where the time and money come back
Pages go live faster because nobody starts from zero, and there are fewer bugs because each component was built and tested once and then reused. You also stop paying an agency to design the same contact form three times.
To see whether you need one, put five pages of your site side by side and count the button styles, heading sizes and shades of your brand colour. If there are more than you'd have signed off on purpose, you're already paying for the system you don't have.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website and design-system services · XOCEAN digital ecosystem case study · Discuss a scalable design system
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.