Design systems for teams of one (or two)
Every design system article you will find online is written for teams of 20 or more. Component libraries maintained by dedicated engineers. Storybook instances with automated visual regression testing. This is not most people's reality.
I spent eight years building and maintaining the OOGLOO design system — a brand and UI system that eventually covered 100+ touchpoints, from a website to printed materials to digital ads to a custom WordPress theme. For most of that time, I was the only person maintaining it.
Start with decisions, not components
Most solo designers try to build a component library first. They spend weeks creating a button component with every possible state — and by the time they are done, the project has moved on and the components are already wrong. The more durable starting point is design decisions. What are the typefaces and why. What is the spacing scale. What are the core colours and what does each one mean. These decisions do not become outdated the way components do.
Document as you go, not at the end
The biggest mistake I made in the first two years was treating documentation as a separate project. I would build a component, ship it, and plan to document it later. Later never came. The system that worked was documenting in the same Figma file, immediately after building. Not a paragraph — a comment. The component name, the usage rule, the one thing not to do with it. Three lines. Every component.
When Figma Variables changed everything
Before Figma Variables, maintaining a system for multiple brand variants meant duplicating files. The OOGLOO system covered a main brand and two sub-brands — three separate component libraries, manually kept in sync. Variables collapsed that to one file, one set of components, three sets of token values. Switching between brand variants became a single click.
The 80/20 rule for solo systems
You do not need to systematise everything. You need to systematise the 20% of components that appear in 80% of your screens — buttons, form inputs, cards, navigation, and typography. A 20-component system that is actually used beats a 200-component system that no one maintains.
