Design Governance
A design system without governance is a suggestion. Governance answers who decides (review board, single owner, democratic vote), how changes happen (RFC, issue, PR), and what the versioning strategy is. Teams that skip governance end up with forked versions: design uses 2.3, engineering uses 1.8, marketing uses 2.0 with local overrides. At that point you have three design systems and zero consistency.
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Related terms
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Component Library
A collection of reusable UI elements (buttons, inputs, cards, modals) built from design tokens and documented with usage guidelines. One layer of a design system, not the whole thing.
Design Tokens
The atomic design values (colors, spacing, typography, shadows, motion) stored as platform-agnostic variables that every component in a design system references.