Three years ago I hated design systems, now I get it

Back in 2021 I was working on a single landing page for a small real estate firm. I thought design systems were just extra work for big corporate teams. Then last month I had to rebuild the same component set for three different property websites. Took me about 8 hours total to recreate buttons, cards, and forms from scratch each time. Now I'm wondering if anyone else has a lightweight system they use for smaller projects that doesn't feel like overkill?

2 comments

2 Comments

taylor_moore1d ago

Why would you build the same thing three times without using a shared file?

lucaslane1d ago

Whoa hold on, you built the exact same thing three separate times? That's wild. I gotta ask, were you just copy-pasting the whole project folder each time or did you literally type it all out again from scratch? Either way, that's a lot of wasted time unless you were trying to learn something new each time. At the very least you could have saved one version as a template and just changed the parts that were different. Man, I feel your pain though, I've done dumb stuff like that before when I was in a hurry and didn't think it through.