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v1.0Released in production

A small, opinionated design system for products that try to be useful.

This is the system that ships the izaias personal website and the cognitive-distance study. It is intentionally narrow, principled, and built to be read by other designers and engineers. Every page here is a working artifact — the same code that runs in production, documented in place.

How the system came to be

The first version of this site used a shadcn template, a neutral gray palette, and a half-dozen font sizes lifted from a Figma library. It looked fine. It said nothing.

I rebuilt it. I chose a single warm-neutral palette, a serif-sans pair, and a single motion curve. I read every component file and asked the same question: why is this decision here, and would I bet on it three years from now?

Most of the system is hand-rolled. That is a deliberate choice, not a failure of taste. Hand-rolling means the constraints are visible, the tradeoffs are arguable, and the next contributor can see the line where my taste ends and the next taste begins.

This site is the documentation. The system ships in three products and is the only way I know how to keep work coherent. It is not for everyone. It is not trying to be.