Stop Designing Screens. Start Designing Systems.

Stop Designing Screens. Start Designing Systems. Most frontend teams think in components. Buttons. Cards. Modals. It works — until it doesn’t. As products grow, things start to break: UI becomes inconsistent Colors drift across pages Dark mode turns into a mess Refactoring design becomes expensive I ran into this problem multiple times. And I realized something important: The issue isn’t components. The issue is that components are not the source of truth. The missing layer Most workflows look like this: Design → Handoff → Code → Drift Even with tools like Figma, maintaining consistency at scale is difficult. Because we’re designing surfaces — not systems. A system-first approach I started restructuring UI like this: Color → Tokens → Semantic Roles → Components → Templates 1. Tokens Instead of hardcoding values: --brand-primary-500 --neutral-900 2. Semantic roles --interactive-primary-bg --text-primary --surface-base Now components don’t care about actual colors. 3. Components .button-