One system, every build

I run a one-person practice, which means every hour of design system work has to pay rent three ways. init-base is 73 components on Astro and Tailwind: heroes, product cards, comparison tables, stat rows, navigation, forms. Fifteen hero variations and eight site archetypes cover the range from warm editorial to dense product marketing, so a new client build starts from a working site, not a blank file.

The same system generates the demo pipeline's output and renders this portfolio. When I changed the type scale on this site last week, I was editing the same tokens a client build inherits.

Colour, type, and spacing live in one token file per project, and components consume tokens rather than values. The practical effect: rebranding a demo site to a prospect's actual palette is a token swap, not a redesign. The demo pipeline leans on exactly this, extracting a prospect's brand colours and applying them across a full generated site.

The discipline that makes it work is boring: an 8px spacing scale with no off-scale values, two weights per typeface, and a rule that any component used twice gets promoted into the system rather than copied.

The honest way to evaluate a design system is to use it in public. This site is the current stress test: the receipt components, the measured-versus-scope colour coding, and the case study layouts are all system components now, which means the next client build inherits them.