Design System: Why your component library is dying (and how we started saving it)

#frontend #designsystem #react #architecture

Every frontend developer has been there: you receive a new prototype in Figma, open the project's component library, and realize that... nothing fits. The colors are slightly different, the spacing doesn't match up, and that "standard" button requires 15 extra lines of CSS just to resemble the design.

Over the last year, I lived exactly this scenario. What started as a robust React library over time became a productivity bottleneck and a museum of obsolete technical decisions.

In this first post, I want to share how we identified that our Design System (DS) was failing and why we decided to rebuild it as a multi-platform ecosystem.

The Diagnosis: The "Drift" Between Design and Code

The first warning sign was inconsistency. The Design team was evolving rapidly, testing new approaches and UX patterns. Meanwhile, our React library was stagnant.

This disconnect creates a dangerous phenomenon known as Shadow CSS. To deliver their tasks on deadline, developers stop using system components and start creating "local versions" or globally overriding styles.

Result? An ever-increasing bundle size, impossible maintenance, and an interface that looks like a patchwork quilt.

When Technology Becomes the Problem

In our case, we had a technical complication: the library was entirely based on styled-components in versions that were already becoming deprecated.

Although CSS-in-JS had its peak, we realized that the way it was implemented throughout the project generated:

Maintenance difficulty: Changing a basic behavior required navigating complex trees of styled components.
Barrier to entry: New stacks (like Mobile) couldn't leverage anything we had already done for Web.

We realized that just updating lib versions wasn't enough. We needed a Design System System (yes, a system to manage the system).

The Turning Point: From React to Multi-platform

The big decision was: stop building just for the Web and start building for the brand.

Our company doesn't live on React alone. We have native Android, iOS, Flutter, and Web. If we kept focusing only on a React library, the inconsistency problem would repeat itself on all other fronts.

The Monorepo Strategy

We decided to migrate to a **Monorepo **structure. The idea was to centralize the Design System's intelligence in a single place, but distribute it to all platforms:

Design Tokens: The Single Source of Truth.
Core Logic: Component business rules that could be shared.
Specific implementations: Dedicated packages for React, Flutter, and Native Mobile.

This changed the game. The Design System stopped being "that React button repository" to become the universal language of engineering at the company.

Why should you care about this?

If you are a Senior Software Developer, you know our job isn't just writing code, but ensuring the solution's maintainability and scalability. Keeping the connection alive between design and code brings clear benefits:

Reduces Time-to-Market: Fewer discussions about pixels, more focus on features.
Eliminates Technical Debt: Brand updates are propagated automatically through tokens.
Unifies the experience: The user feels they are using the same product, whether on the site or the app.