What a Design System Actually Costs
by Ingrid Valdez
Design systems have a reputation for being expensive, enterprise-scale projects. At our size, a design system is a single shared file of colours, type styles and a few dozen components. It is less glamorous, and far more useful.
What we actually build
For a typical small business site we define a colour palette with named roles, a type scale, a spacing scale and around twenty components such as buttons, cards, forms and navigation. That is enough to build every page and to add new ones without redrawing anything.
Where the savings come from
The first saving is in design. New pages assemble from existing parts, so a landing page takes an afternoon instead of a week. The second is in development, because components are built once and reused. The third, and the largest, appears later, when the client adds pages without us.
The best design system is the one the client can still use after we have left.
A rough cost breakdown
- Audit and palette: half a day
- Type and spacing scales: half a day
- Core components: three to four days
- Documentation: one day
Roughly one working week, folded into the design fee. For a site that will grow for years, that is a bargain.