Design to Code — A designer's journey building a design system. Insights on design tokens, components, Tailwind, AI, and the full stack of building 7onic.https://blog.7onic.design/https://blog.7onic.design/body-baseline-color-five-patches/https://blog.7onic.design/body-baseline-color-five-patches/I shipped `html body { color }` with four different values across five releases. Each one fixed a different way of being wrong — until I found the generator.Mon, 18 May 2026 14:31:48 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/button-five-sizes/https://blog.7onic.design/button-five-sizes/I designed buttons at 5 sizes. Deleted one before shipping, discovered a gap, added a different size back. Ended up with 5 again — just not the same 5.Mon, 18 May 2026 08:37:08 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/copy-paste-vs-npm-install/https://blog.7onic.design/copy-paste-vs-npm-install/Five days after publishing @7onic-ui/react@0.1.0, I started building a CLI that copies files instead. The npm package still ships. Here's the trade-off.Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:31:46 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/cva-limits-of-a-good-pattern/https://blog.7onic.design/cva-limits-of-a-good-pattern/Every 7onic component starts with CVA. A pre-publish lint sweep deleted it from five of them — including one where the cva call itself had no variants at all.Tue, 26 May 2026 06:50:16 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/dark-mode-no-javascript/https://blog.7onic.design/dark-mode-no-javascript/7onic handles dark mode purely in CSS. One word from the Tailwind v4 migration guide silently broke it for every v4 user. The fix was removing that word.Tue, 26 May 2026 06:19:01 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/lessons-from-42-components/https://blog.7onic.design/lessons-from-42-components/On April 4th I shipped 22 compound components. On April 22nd I deleted all of them. The breaking change cost nothing because no one was using it yet.Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:24:01 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/public-repo-sync-incident/https://blog.7onic.design/public-repo-sync-incident/A macOS update silently swapped rsync. My public repo's git history vanished. My first fix made it worse. Then I merged a bad commit without checking the diff.Mon, 18 May 2026 09:05:17 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/rgb-channels-for-tailwind-opacity-modifiers/https://blog.7onic.design/rgb-channels-for-tailwind-opacity-modifiers/I converted design tokens to CSS var() for cleaner SSOT. Every /50 modifier stopped working. Tailwind v3 didn't warn me once. Here's the three-tier fix.Mon, 18 May 2026 07:36:36 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/single-entry-point/https://blog.7onic.design/single-entry-point/How a generateCode() function in our docs told users to import from a subpath that was never in the package — and why we still ship one entry point.Tue, 26 May 2026 07:31:34 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/solo-building-what-nobody-tells-you/https://blog.7onic.design/solo-building-what-nobody-tells-you/Building a design system alone sounds like a shortcut. No meetings, no politics, full ownership. Here's what that actually looks like.Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:00:00 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/tailwind-v4-migration-what-actually-changed/https://blog.7onic.design/tailwind-v4-migration-what-actually-changed/Migrating from Tailwind CSS v3 to v4 while supporting both — the silent dark mode bug, reversed variant stacking, and the outline flash nobody warned about.Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/token-pipeline-one-json-11-outputs/https://blog.7onic.design/token-pipeline-one-json-11-outputs/How a single JSON file generates 11 distribution formats — and the three problems I ran into building the sync-tokens pipeline for 7onic.Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:00:00 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/using-ai-to-build-a-design-system/https://blog.7onic.design/using-ai-to-build-a-design-system/I use Claude for almost everything in 7onic. I also wrote three shell scripts whose job is to catch it reporting things as done when they aren't.Tue, 26 May 2026 05:35:36 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/why-i-built-7onic/https://blog.7onic.design/why-i-built-7onic/I spent 10 years watching pixels drift between Figma and production. Here's why I stopped filing tickets and started building a design system from scratch.Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://blog.7onic.design/why-i-chose-radix-ui/https://blog.7onic.design/why-i-chose-radix-ui/I tried to build a dialog focus trap from scratch. Got it wrong in an afternoon. Here is what Radix actually handles — and what it still gets wrong.Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:25:14 GMT