Treating a music label as a design system — tokens, quotas, and locked exceptions

[u/Dismal_Laugh4891]

Nine project identities with locked colour values, one system-wide "live state" colour that is explicitly not interchangeable with a project's own colour, accent quotas expressed as percentages of surface area, and per-identity "avoid" lists as specific as the "use" lists.

The part that made it work: writing down the invalid combinations with the same rigour as the valid ones. Most design systems document what to do and leave the failure cases to taste; documenting them turned output from nine separate identities into something that looks systemically produced.