The profile ring creator was the first tool I added to /tools/ on my site. Quick browser utility, grabs colors from your screen camera feed, shows you the hex value. I gave it a dark navy background and a bright blue button and called it done. That was the whole principle: if it works, it’s finished.
That principle held up fine for one tool.
Then came the QR code generator. Then a color picker. Then a star map, a generative sky chart for any date and location. Then a handwriting font matcher. Five tools in total, each built at a different moment, each arriving at slightly different visual decisions because I didn’t think I needed them to agree.
When I looked at them all together, they looked like they came from five different sites. The color picker’s primary button was a solid bright blue. The star map’s was the same blue with a different shadow treatment. The profile ring creator had slightly looser padding than the others. None of it was individually wrong. The second you saw all five on the same page, it was the only thing you could see.
I told myself I didn’t care. Then I spent an evening writing a design system spec.
The file lives at docs/tools-design-system.md now. It locks in the color tokens, button styles, page chrome, panel patterns. Primary button: --accent-2, solid fill. The spec isn’t dramatic. Most of the individual decisions I’d made independently turned out to be right, just inconsistent. Writing them down meant the next tool doesn’t have to rediscover them, and changing one value updates everything.
Then came the retrofit. Color picker, aligned. Profile ring creator, aligned. Handwriting font matcher, aligned. Star map, aligned. Each one took about 15 minutes of work that wouldn’t have been necessary if I’d written the spec before tool number one.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the day. I had opinions about how these things should look and I didn’t know what those opinions were until I had enough examples in front of me to see the pattern. You can’t always write the spec first. Sometimes you have to build a few things to understand what the spec should say.
But these tools are not driving significant traffic. Nobody is waiting for visual consistency on the star map. I did this because looking at something slightly wrong bothered me enough to fix it. “Just ship it” is good advice. It has a ceiling, and I hit it around tool number four.
If I could tell the me who shipped the profile ring creator: write the spec at three. You’ll save yourself a retrofit.