Five ideas everyone agreed to in the same meeting
These principles were ratified in a single 90-minute working session with representatives from Design, Engineering, Product, and one Director who joined for the last eleven minutes and requested Principle 4 be added.
Consistency, Contextually Applied
WEASEL believes that a design system should look and feel the same everywhere, and that every team is best positioned to decide what "the same" means for them. This has produced a button that is, contextually, three different shapes. See Components for the contextual applications.
Ship Fast, Ship Once
We believe in getting it right the first time, so teams can move on to the next thing without revisiting old decisions. Compare Principle 05.
One Source of Truth
Every token, pattern, and guideline lives in a single, authoritative place, so no one is ever working from stale information. That place is currently three Figma files: one actively maintained, one frozen since a reorg, and one that the maintaining team can no longer open, having lost edit access when its owner changed teams. All three are linked from this page, in the interest of completeness.
Design for Everyone
WEASEL is built for every user, on every team, in every context. In practice, "everyone" refers to whichever stakeholders were in the room when the decision was made — a definition that has proven remarkably stable, since it is technically always true.
Iterate Relentlessly
Nothing is ever finished. We treat every release as a starting point for the next one, and we revisit our decisions constantly, in the spirit of continuous improvement. Compare Principle 02.
Simplicity is Non-Negotiable
We remove complexity wherever we find it, in service of a system so simple that anyone can use it without documentation. WEASEL currently ships 212 components. Four of them have a purpose the rest of the organization agrees on.