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Design system builderFree plan, no card

Design systems. Built to ship.

Create tokens, customise 90 components, and check accessibility in one place. Export your system to Figma, Tailwind, MUI, and CSS.

See how it works

Free plan: 3 design files. Sign in with an email address. Or write to us if you would rather ask a question first.

The builder

8 areas, one system

Build your palette, type, spacing, shape and motion. Customise 90 components and export the same system to Figma and code.

  • Colour & roles
  • Typography
  • Spacing & layout
  • Shape & elevation
  • Motion
  • Logos & graphics
  • Components
  • Preview

The live builder needs a desktop — it puts a rail, a canvas and an inspector on screen at once.

Watch the tour

See Arkitype, start to handoff

Seven minutes, narrated and captioned: a client's system set up from scratch, built out, and handed to developers, designers and the client — then kept in step as it changes. Jump to any chapter.

Why Arkitype

Four things a design system has to get right

Most tools hand you a palette and wish you luck. These are the parts that decide whether what you build survives contact with a real product.

  1. Tokens that cascade

    One colour in. A whole system out.

    Paste a hex and Arkitype generates the primitive ramps, binds them to semantic roles, and points every component at those roles — three tiers, properly wired. Change the primitive six weeks later and the change lands everywhere at once, because nothing downstream holds a copy of it.

  2. Contrast, checked live

    Accessibility you can see failing.

    Every pairing your roles and token groups imply is scored against WCAG AA as you work, in light and dark at the same time — not as a report at the end. When a pairing fails, Arkitype proposes the smallest change that fixes it, so the answer is one click rather than an afternoon of guessing at hex values.

  3. 90 real components

    A library, not a mood board.

    Buttons, inputs, tables, modals and navigation — 90 parts with full variant, size and state coverage, every one of them reading from your tokens. Nothing here is a static mockup waiting to be rebuilt by hand once the design is signed off.

  4. Exports that agree

    One source. 17 artifacts.

    Figma Variables, Tailwind, MUI, plain CSS, documentation and a hosted styleguide, all compiled from the same tokens. There is no second copy to keep in sync, and no build step between the decision and the code — because there is no second copy.

How it works

8 areas, worked in any order

A design system is not built in a line. You pick a palette, build a button out of it, find the palette can't carry a disabled state, and go back — three times, on a normal day. Every area here is open from the first minute and stays editable forever; change something late and everything downstream updates and tells you where it landed.

The library

90 components, already bound to your tokens

Nothing here is a static mockup. Buttons, inputs, tables, modals, navigation and more — every part reads from your design tokens with full modifier parity, variants, sizes and states included, so a change upstream lands in all of them at once.

  • 26Controls
  • 28Display
  • 16Navigation
  • 20Patterns
Browse the component reference

What you get

Everything a design system needs, included

No plugins to assemble, no token pipeline to build, no second copy of anything to keep in sync.

Export to Figma, Tailwind, MUI and CSS

One system, compiled straight out to 17 artifacts — the 7 below, and 10 more, from DTCG tokens to a lint ruleset. Every one is generated from the same tokens, so no two of them can disagree — and there is no build step to keep in sync.

Figma bundle
CSS variables
Tailwind config
MUI theme
Markdown handoff
AI agent guide
Claude skill

Going to Figma? Arkitype Figma Sync, the free companion plugin, turns the export into a real file — variables in both modes, a page per component, and docs. Re-run it after any change and the file updates in place.

Get the plugin

Questions

Design systems, answered

What tokens are, how this reaches Figma and code, and what it costs.

  • What is a design system?

    A design system is the single agreed source for how a product looks and behaves: its colour roles, type scale, spacing, shape, motion, and the components built from them. It is not a style guide document — it is a set of named values that both a design file and production code read from, so a change made once shows up everywhere it should.

  • What are design tokens?

    Design tokens are the named values underneath a design system — brand-600, space-4, radius-md, action-primary — used in place of raw hex codes and pixel numbers. Because a token is a name rather than a value, the value behind it can change once and every screen, component and export that references it follows automatically.

  • What does Arkitype actually do?

    Arkitype is a design system builder. You give it one brand colour; it solves a perceptually even colour ramp, maps semantic roles onto it, and opens 8 areas — colour, type, spacing, shape, motion, assets, components and preview — that you can work in any order, plus Ship, which is where the finished system leaves the building rather than another area. It audits every colour pairing your roles and token groups imply against WCAG as you go, binds 90 components to the tokens you have chosen, and compiles the finished system to Figma Variables, Tailwind, MUI, CSS custom properties, Markdown and an AI-agent guide, plus a hosted styleguide.

  • Do I need to know how to code to use Arkitype?

    No. Every part of the builder is a visual control — pick a colour, drag a scale, choose a radius — and the code artifacts are generated for you at the end. Developers get real output they can drop into a project, but nothing about building the system requires writing any.

  • How does Arkitype work with Figma?

    Arkitype exports a Figma Variables bundle, and a free companion plugin — Arkitype Figma Sync, on the Figma Community — turns that bundle into a real file: variables in both light and dark modes, a page per component, and documentation. After a change, republish (or re-export the bundle) and re-run the plugin: it updates the existing file in place rather than creating a second copy to keep in sync.

  • Can I export my design system to Tailwind CSS?

    Yes. Ship writes a Tailwind config with your colour ramps, semantic roles, type scale, spacing scale, radii and shadows already mapped onto Tailwind's theme keys. The same system also compiles to a MUI theme, to plain CSS custom properties, and to Markdown handoff documentation — all generated from the same tokens, so the three can never disagree.

  • Does Arkitype check accessibility?

    Continuously. A contrast engine watches every foreground-and-background pairing your roles and token groups imply against WCAG AA, in both light and dark modes, while you work — not as a report you run at the end. When a pairing fails it proposes the smallest reversible change that fixes it — or the closest one, and says it falls short, when no change to that colour can — so accessibility is a constraint you design inside rather than a rewrite you do afterwards.

  • Can AI coding tools use the output?

    That is one of the exports. Given no system in a form they can read, AI coding tools invent plausible values — a slightly different blue, a radius of 6 because 6 looked right. Arkitype compiles your system into an agent-readable guide and a Claude skill, so a tool like Cursor, Copilot or Claude Code generates UI against your real tokens instead of improvising its own.

  • How is this different from a colour palette generator?

    A palette generator hands you five hex codes and stops. Arkitype carries one colour all the way through to a working system: semantic roles that survive a theme switch, a type and spacing scale that agree with each other, 90 components already bound to those tokens, contrast checked on every pairing your roles imply, and code and Figma output at the end. The palette is the first minute of the job, not the job.

  • Is Arkitype free?

    There is a free plan — 3 design files and a published styleguide, the whole builder, and every export format, with no card. Larger plans, listed on the pricing page with whether they are on sale yet, raise the number and size of files, collaborators per file, published styleguides and how long version history is kept. Nothing you build is locked in: Ship writes tokens, code and a Figma bundle in formats this product does not own.

Longer answers live in the manual, and the background reading is in the guides.

Make it your system.

Start with your brand. Refine the foundations, shape the components, and take your system into design and code.

Read the manual
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