Bare Form

Bare Form had a component library. The problem was that it had three, none of which matched the site that was live.

We cut the inventory by roughly half, kept the components that carried real load, and documented each one against the cases that were breaking it rather than against an ideal example.

The system now ships with usage notes written for the engineers who implement it, not for the designers who drew it — which is the difference between a library that holds and one that forks again within a year.

• One Source of Truth — Collapse three libraries into a system that matches production.
• Stop the Forking — Make the shared components easier to use than a local copy.
• Document the Failures — Cover the cases that break, not the ideal example.

Bare Form had a component library. The problem was that it had three, none of which matched the site that was live, and each team had quietly forked the one nearest to hand.

We were brought in to consolidate, but the real work was deciding what to delete and writing documentation the engineers would actually use.

Fewer components, better documented. The cut was the hard part and the reason the system has held.

• Halved Inventory — Every remaining component earns its place in production.
• Failure-Led Docs — Each component documented against what was breaking it.
• Engineer-First — Written for the people implementing, not the people drawing.

Eighteen months on there is still one library, which is the outcome the previous two attempts did not reach.