You built a component library. Six months later, your app has three different button styles, two competing color palettes, and a modal that looks nothing like the rest of your UI. The problem isn't that you didn't try—it's that design systems are hard to maintain, especially when design and code live in separate worlds.
This guide covers how to build a React design system that actually stays consistent over time, from setting up design tokens and structuring components to using AI tools that keep everything in sync.
Building and maintaining a consistent React design system means treating it as a product—one that requires collaboration, documentation, and continuous iteration. A design system is a collection of reusable components, design tokens, and guidelines that keep your UI consistent across your entire app.
So what makes a design system different from a component library? A component library gives you buttons and inputs. A design system goes further—it includes the principles, documentation, and tokens that explain when and how to use those components.
Here's what a typical React design system includes:
If your team has built the same button three different ways across your app, you've got a consistency problem. This happens more often than you'd expect—especially when designers work in Figma while developers work in code, and the two slowly drift apart.
The pain points are familiar: inconsistent UI that confuses users, wasted time recreating patterns that already exist, and constant friction during design-to-code handoffs.
A well-maintained design system addresses all of this:
AI tools are changing how teams build React design systems. Instead of starting from a blank file every time, you can use AI to generate component scaffolds, explore design variations, and maintain consistency as your system grows.
You can prompt AI to generate a component skeleton or even a full implementation. A prompt like "Create a card component with image, title, description, and action button" can produce a working starting point in seconds.
You'll still want to refine it, but the initial scaffolding is done.
AI helps you explore different visual approaches quickly. Instead of manually designing five versions of a pricing card, you can generate variations and pick the direction that feels right.
This is especially useful for A/B testing ideas or finding the right style early in a project.
Some AI tools learn your existing design patterns to generate components that match your system's style. This keeps new components consistent with what you've already built—so your AI-generated Alert component looks like it belongs next to your hand-crafted Button.
Every design system has a few foundational pieces. Here's what you're working with:
| Component | Purpose | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Design tokens | Store reusable values | --color-primary: #3B82F6 |
| UI components | Reusable interface elements | Button, Input, Modal |
| Documentation | Usage guidelines | Props table, code examples |
| Theming | Brand customization | Light/dark mode, custom colors |
Design tokens are named variables that store your design decisions. Think of them as the single source of truth for colors, spacing, typography, and other visual properties.
When you change a token, every component using it updates automatically.
UI components are your building blocks—buttons, inputs, cards, modals, and everything else users interact with. Good components are composable and follow consistent APIs, so developers can predict how they work without checking documentation every time.
Documentation determines whether your design system actually gets used. Teams often skip this step, then wonder why developers keep building one-off components instead of using the system.
Include usage guidelines, prop tables, and examples of correct and incorrect usage.
Theming lets you swap visual styles—like switching to dark mode or applying brand colors—without changing component logic. Your Button component stays the same; only the tokens it references change.
Design tokens form the foundation of your system. Here's how to structure them.
Raw colors like blue-500 are useful, but semantic tokens like color-primary and color-error are more powerful. Semantic tokens describe purpose, not appearance—so when your brand color changes, you update one token instead of hunting through your codebase.
// tailwind.config.js
colors: {
primary: '#3B82F6',
error: '#EF4444',
background: '#FFFFFF',
}
Define font families, sizes, weights, and line heights as tokens. Create text styles like text-heading-lg or text-body-sm that combine properties into reusable patterns.
Consistent spacing creates visual rhythm. Most systems use a scale based on multiples of 4px or 8px—like 4, 8, 16, 24, 32. This prevents the "why is this 13px?" questions during code review.
Border radii, border widths, and shadows deserve tokens too. A radius-md token is easier to maintain than hardcoded 8px values scattered across your components.
Good organization keeps your system maintainable as it grows.
Atomic design breaks components into atoms, molecules, and organisms. Atoms are basic elements like Button. Molecules combine atoms—a SearchInput might be an Input plus a Button. Organisms are complex sections like a Header or Navigation.
Keep your design system in a dedicated folder—/components or /design-system. This makes it clear what's part of the system versus one-off UI for specific features.
Use PascalCase for component names and kebab-case for files. Consistent naming helps developers find components and prevents duplicates like Button, Btn, and PrimaryButton all existing in the same codebase.
Now for the actual component creation.
Build your basic components first. A Button component might accept props like variant, size, and disabled:
<Button variant="primary" size="md">
Save changes
</Button>
Combine atomic components into larger patterns. An Alert component might use Icon, Text, and Button together. This composition approach keeps your atoms simple while enabling complex UI.
Compound components and slot patterns prevent prop explosion. Instead of a Card component with 15 props, you might have Card, Card.Header, Card.Body, and Card.Footer that compose together.
Theming support makes your design system flexible enough for different brands and user preferences.
Structure your tokens into theme sets. Light and dark themes might share the same token names but with different values:
:root {
--color-background: #FFFFFF;
--color-text: #1F2937;
}
[data-theme="dark"] {
--color-background: #111827;
--color-text: #F9FAFB;
}
Use React context to manage theme state. A ThemeProvider component wraps your app and makes the current theme available to all components.
Toggle themes based on user preference or system settings. The prefers-color-scheme media query lets you respect what users have already chosen at the OS level.
Documentation is where many design systems fail. Here's how to make yours useful.
Manually maintaining Storybook is tedious, and it drifts out of sync with your actual components. Tools that auto-generate documentation from your component code eliminate this problem—your docs always match reality.
Each component doc benefits from a props table, usage examples, and do's and don'ts. Show the component in different states: default, hover, disabled, error.
Explain when to use each component. "Use Button for actions, Link for navigation" prevents developers from making buttons that look like links and vice versa.
Building a design system is only half the work. Getting your team to actually use it is the other half.
ESLint rules can catch one-off styles and flag components that don't come from your design system. Code review checklists that specifically check for design system usage help too.
Publishing your design system as an npm package or using a monorepo makes importing official components easier than building custom ones. When the right path is also the easy path, adoption happens naturally.
When designers and developers work in the same tool, divergence becomes harder. Everyone builds from the same source of truth, so consistency happens by default rather than requiring constant vigilance.
The work doesn't stop after launch. Design systems require ongoing care.
Use semantic versioning: breaking changes bump the major version, new components bump minor, and bug fixes bump patch. This helps teams know what to expect when they update.
Retire old components gracefully. Warn developers, provide a migration path, then remove the component after a reasonable period. Sudden breaking changes erode trust in the system.
Visual regression testing catches accidental style changes. Unit tests verify component behavior. Together, they prevent the "I just updated one thing and broke five screens" problem.
The core handoff problem is that designers work in Figma while developers work in code, and the two drift apart over time. You end up maintaining two versions of the same system—one in design files, one in code—and they're never quite in sync.
The solution is a single source of truth. This might mean design tokens that export directly to code, visual editors that generate real components, or tools where design and code are the same artifact.
When a designer changes a button's padding, that change flows directly to the codebase without a developer manually translating it.
Tip: Tools like Subframe let you design with real React components and auto-generate documentation, eliminating the drift between design files and Storybook instances.
Building a design system from scratch takes months. Maintaining it takes even longer. Subframe accelerates both by letting you design with real React components, auto-generate documentation, and keep design and code in sync automatically.
Your design system in Subframe becomes the single source of truth—no more drift between Figma and code, no more manually updating Storybook. And with AI that learns your design patterns, generating new components that match your system's style takes seconds instead of hours.
Yes—AI tools can generate new components that match your existing patterns, suggest updates when design tokens change, and identify inconsistencies across your codebase. The key is using AI that understands your specific system, not just generic React patterns.
Use tools that auto-generate documentation directly from your components. When your docs are derived from your actual code, they stay in sync without manual updates.
Start by replacing one high-use component—like Button—with your design system version. Once that's stable, expand to related components. You don't have to rewrite everything at once; incremental adoption reduces risk and builds team confidence.
Connect your design system via an MCP server or similar integration. This lets the AI understand your components and generate code that uses them correctly, rather than inventing new patterns that don't match your system.
