Building a Basic CSS Design System

The small visual-consistency decisions worth making once, not per-component.

Colors come first because gradients, shadows, and other visual elements are often built using those same base colors, so having them finalized first avoids reworking dependent decisions later. Gradients and shadows are separate steps because they're genuinely different kinds of decisions -- a gradient is about color transition, a shadow is about depth and elevation -- and treating them as one step tends to produce inconsistent results across a real interface. Border radius is last since it's the one purely geometric decision in the set, independent of color entirely.

Each step opens as its own tool -- download from one, upload into the next, same as any free tool on the site.