How we rebuilt our design system with Tailwind

Our old stylesheet had grown for years. It worked, but every new feature added a little more weight, and no one felt confident deleting anything. This year we rebuilt it from the ground up on a token-driven foundation.

Starting with tokens

We began by defining our core tokens — colour, type scale, spacing, and motion — as a single source of truth. Everything else is derived from them, so a change in one place ripples everywhere consistently.

Composing, not overriding

Instead of writing bespoke CSS for each component, we compose utilities. This keeps our styles predictable and makes it obvious what a component looks like just by reading its markup.

The best part is that new engineers are productive on day one. There is no hidden stylesheet to learn.

The results

The migration cut our shipped CSS roughly in half and made our UI far more consistent. Just as importantly, the team now trusts the system enough to move quickly with it.