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Your components look perfect in Figma but chaotic in production, here’s the spacing framework that fixes it.
Every design system tutorial starts with colors and typography. But there’s a more fundamental layer that most teams get wrong: spacing. Poor spacing systems are why your beautiful Figma components look messy when developers implement them, why responsive layouts break unpredictably, and why adding new features destroys your visual consistency.
The problem isn’t that designers don’t understand spacing, it’s that most spacing systems are built backwards, focusing on individual components instead of relationships between them.
Why Most Spacing Systems Fail
The Component-First Trap
Traditional approach: Define padding and margins for each component individually.
Why it fails: Components don’t exist in isolation. They exist in layouts, next to other components, in different contexts.
The result: Components that look great alone but create visual chaos when combined.
Mathematical vs Optical Spacing
Mathematical spacing: Everything uses multiples of 8px because it’s clean and…