Edition 01 - August 2026 · prepared for icare

Notes on building a design system that people actually use.

Five practical chapters for the design leads standing this up: what to decide first, what to defer, and the traps that quietly cost a year. Lessons learned appear in context alongside recommendations for icare.

01 Governance and ownership Who decides, how a change gets approved, and what to escalate. 5 min 02 Design tokens and theming Naming tiers that survive a rebrand, and where to stop abstracting. 5 min 03 Documentation practices Write for the person copying a component at 4pm on a Friday. 8 min 04 Adoption and change management Make the system the path of least resistance, not a mandate. 7 min 05 Roadmap and versioning Ship on boundaries, deprecate loudly, keep a public changelog. 6 min