Why consistent design tokens matter more than clever components, and how to keep a growing UI from drifting apart.
A component library succeeds or fails long before you write a single component. It comes down to whether your design tokens — color, spacing, type scale — are consistent and shared.
I learned this the hard way auditing my own portfolio: the same heading rendered at three different sizes across pages because every component hardcoded its own values. No clever abstraction fixes that; only a single source of truth does.
Once tokens are centralized, components become thin and predictable. A button doesn't invent its own padding — it references the scale. That's what lets a UI grow without drifting apart.
