Designing Component Systems

You already know what a button, a field, and a modal look like. The hard part starts when a teammate asks why this one is a dropdown and that one is a segmented control — and the honest answer is a shrug.

Most tutorials hand you a finished screen. They rarely show the twenty small decisions underneath it: which states matter, where the affordance lives, what happens when the label runs long, and how the component behaves on the worst day of its life.

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