Design system
A design system is a shared library of reusable components, patterns and rules, along with the design tokens behind them: colours, type scale, spacing and states. It helps teams build consistent interfaces faster, and change them in one place.
In practice
What it means when you are the one making the decision.
At its smallest, a design system is a style guide plus a handful of components such as buttons, forms and cards. At larger scale it includes documentation, code and design files kept in sync so designers and developers use the same building blocks.
The benefit is consistency and speed: new pages are assembled from known parts, accessibility is built into the components once, and a brand update can flow through the whole site. For a small business, a light system is often enough and keeps a website coherent as it grows.
Example
A site defines one button style with clear hover and focus states, and every page reuses it. Changing the brand colour later is a one-line update.
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