Design Systems for Businesses That Aren't Design Companies
"Design system" sounds like something a company with a design department has. For a business with a website and one person who occasionally updates it, the useful version is much smaller — and it exists to solve a specific, mundane problem.
That problem is drift. Someone adds a page, picks a slightly different blue, uses a heading one size larger, adds a button with rounded corners that don't match. Repeat over two years and the site looks like four websites in a trench coat.
The six decisions
1. Colours — five of them. One dark for text, one brand colour, one accent, one light background, one border grey. Written down as hex values, not "our blue."
Five is enough for almost any business site. More than that and consistency stops being achievable by a non-designer.
2. Two typefaces, maximum. One for headings, one for body. Sizes fixed at a handful of steps — say five — rather than typed in per page. Most amateur-looking pages are amateur-looking because of typographic inconsistency, not colour.
3. Spacing on a scale. Pick a base unit and use multiples of it. Everything spaced at 8, 16, 24, 32, 48 looks deliberate. Everything spaced at 13, 27, 31 looks accidental — even when nobody can say why.
4. One button style, with one variant. A primary and a secondary. Same shape, same padding, same radius everywhere. The number of sites with six button styles is remarkable, and every one of them got there honestly.
5. Image treatment. Do photos have rounded corners? Is there a consistent aspect ratio for cards? Are illustrations flat or shadowed? One choice, applied throughout.
6. Voice. Not visual, but part of the same problem. Do you say "we" or "the team"? Is it "Contact Us" or "Get in Touch"? Sentence case or Title Case for headings? Write the answers down.
Where to keep it
One page. In whatever the business already uses — a shared doc is completely fine. Hex codes, font names and sizes, spacing values, a screenshot of each button, three sentences on voice.
The elaborate version, with tokens and component libraries, is genuinely valuable for a company shipping a product with a design team. For a service business, it's a document that gets made once and never opened.
The test that proves it works
Ask someone who isn't a designer to add a new page to your site.
If they can do it without asking what colour to use, without inventing a new heading size, and without the result looking foreign — the system is working. If they can't, the system isn't written down clearly enough, no matter how thorough it feels.
What it's actually buying you
Consistency reads as competence. A visitor can't articulate why one site feels professional and another feels improvised, but they respond to it, and they respond in the first few seconds.
Six decisions, one page. That's the whole system.