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CYC26 / Frontend

Design Systems 101: The Developer Approach to Better Frontends

A well-built design system doesn’t just make your UI consistent, it makes your product better. Better developer experience, better user experience, better product velocity. But, getting there takes more than just a component library. In this workshop, we'll take a deliberate approach to building a JavaScript design system using React, Storybook, and CSS tokens. We'll start with primitives… the layout, spacing, and typography foundations, and build upward into a structured, scalable system you can actually ship and maintain.

Session abstract

What you’ll learn

A well-built design system doesn’t just make your UI consistent, it makes your product better. Better developer experience, better user experience, better product velocity. But, getting there takes more than just a component library. In this workshop, we'll take a deliberate approach to building a JavaScript design system using React, Storybook, and CSS tokens. We'll start with primitives… the layout, spacing, and typography foundations, and build upward into a structured, scalable system you can actually ship and maintain.