Design Systems for Solo Developers: Building Component Libraries That Scale
Enterprise design systems (Material, Carbon, Polaris) are built by teams of 20+. Solo developers need design systems too — but lighter, faster, and practical. This guide covers building a minimal, effective component library that maintains consistency across your projects.
Google's Material Design system has hundreds of contributors and thousands of components. You're one developer building multiple projects (NoteArc, Kimaya Threads, ServiceCrud). You don't need Material Design. You need a minimal, opinionated design system that: ensures consistency across your projects, provides ready-made components that accelerate development, and encodes your design decisions so you don't remake them for every project.
The Minimum Viable Design System
A design system for a solo developer needs exactly five layers:
Layer 1: Design Tokens. Variables that store design decisions: colors (primary, secondary, neutral scales, semantic colors), typography (font families, size scale, weight scale, line heights), spacing (4px-based scale: 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64), border radius (none, sm, md, lg, full), and shadows (sm, md, lg). These tokens live in CSS custom properties (variables) or a JS theme object. Every component references tokens — never hard-coded values.
Layer 2: Base Styles. Global styles that apply to HTML elements: reset/normalize (consistent cross-browser baseline), body typography (font-family, font-size, line-height, color), heading styles (h1-h6 with type scale sizes), link styles (color, hover state, text-decoration), and form element defaults (input, select, textarea base styling).
Layer 3: Utility Classes (Optional). Single-purpose classes for common patterns: spacing utilities (.mt-4, .px-6), flex utilities (.flex, .flex-col, .items-center), text utilities (.text-sm, .font-bold, .text-center), and display utilities (.hidden, .block, .grid). Keep this minimal — 20-30 utilities that cover 80% of layout needs.
Layer 4: Components. Reusable UI components. The essential set for most projects: Button (primary, secondary, ghost, sizes), Input (text, email, password, with label and error state), Card (container with optional header, body, footer), Modal/Dialog (overlay with content, close action), Badge/Tag (small label elements), Alert/Toast (feedback messages with semantic colors), and Table (with header, rows, pagination).
Layer 5: Patterns. Common page-level patterns built from components: Form layout (label + input + error + submit pattern), List with actions (data display with CRUD operations), Empty state (illustration + message + CTA), and Page header (title + breadcrumb + action buttons).
Building the System Incrementally
Don't build the design system before your first project — build it during your first project and extract after your second. The process: Project 1: build components as needed, with design tokens from the start. Project 2: identify components that are identical in both projects — extract them to a shared library. Project 3: the shared library is your design system. Refine, document, and evolve it.
This build-extract-refine approach prevents the common design system mistake: over-engineering components for hypothetical use cases. Every component in your system exists because at least two projects needed it — not because you imagined a future scenario.
Documentation: The Future-You Guide
Documentation for a solo developer isn't a public Storybook site — it's a reference for future-you who forgot the API 6 months later. Minimum documentation per component: what it does (one sentence), how to use it (code example), available props/variants (table of options), and visual preview (screenshot or live preview).
The documentation can be a single markdown file per component in the library repository. No fancy documentation tools needed — a well-structured README serves the solo developer better than an elaborate documentation site that takes longer to maintain than the components themselves.
Technology Choices
For React developers: CSS Modules or styled-components for scoped styling, with design tokens in a shared theme file. For multi-framework developers: CSS custom properties (framework-agnostic — works in React, Vue, vanilla JS). For maximum portability: Web Components (custom elements that work everywhere, though with higher implementation complexity).
The solo developer's design system isn't about building something impressive. It's about building something useful — a personal toolkit that makes your fifth project as visually consistent as your first, without spending hours on design decisions you've already made. The investment: 20-40 hours of extraction and documentation. The return: hundreds of hours saved across future projects, with visual consistency that makes every project look like it was built by a team, not a solo developer.