Design systems and component libraries
A design system is worth building when a site or product will keep growing and more than one person will add to it. Below that threshold it is overhead — a four-page brochure site does not need design tokens, and pretending otherwise is billing for ceremony.
Where it does apply, the value is in constraint rather than reuse. Tokens for colour, type scale, spacing and radius mean a new page has a small number of correct options rather than infinite ones. Components carry their variants and their states with them, so nobody has to remember what a secondary button looks like when disabled. The system is documented with the rules that are not obvious from looking at it — when to use each variant, and what not to do.
The thing that determines whether a design system survives is not how well it was designed but how closely the Figma components match the code components. When they drift apart, developers stop trusting the file and start reading the codebase instead, and the system quietly becomes decoration. Building both is how we avoid that.
Design that developers can actually build
A large share of the friction between design and development is not disagreement, it is under-specification. The design shows one state of one component at one width, and everything else — what happens at 900px, what the disabled variant looks like, how the card behaves with a two-line title — gets decided by whoever is writing the CSS at the time. Then the design review flags it as wrong.
- Breakpoints designed, including how the layout behaves between them rather than only at them
- Every interactive element shown in hover, focus, active and disabled
- Empty states, loading states and error states drawn rather than assumed
- Long-content and short-content versions of anything content-driven
- Spacing on a consistent scale, so it can be implemented rather than measured pixel by pixel
- Fonts, icons and assets supplied in the formats the build actually needs
None of that is glamorous, and it is most of the difference between a handover that takes an afternoon and one that generates three weeks of clarifying questions.
What web design costs
We do not publish design rates, for the same reason we do not publish development rates: the range is wide enough that a single figure would be wrong for most people reading it. Per-page pricing in particular is misleading, because twelve pages assembled from six repeating layouts is a smaller job than four entirely bespoke ones.
- How much is genuinely bespoke versus repeating an established layout
- Whether a reusable system is being produced, or a fixed set of screens
- How much research, iteration and testing the project warrants
- Whether brand direction already exists or is being established
- Whether we build it afterwards, which removes the re-specification cost
We scope against your brief and quote a fixed figure with an agreed number of revision rounds. We do not offer unlimited revisions — that is a promise which either goes unkept or gets priced for the worst case, and neither serves you.
