A border, some spacing, and a readable type scale go a long way. Skip the utility soup and write the handful of rules your page actually uses.

A design kit is useful when you have dozens of screens and a team arguing over buttons. A homepage with a card and three posts is not that. It is a few decisions: cream background, black border, type that you can read without squinting.

Write the rules you can see

Start with the page in front of you. Set the font, the measure, the space between blocks. Give the card a border thick enough to feel like a decision. Repeat that weight on the button and the lines between posts so the site feels like one thing.

You do not need a token file to do this. You need a stylesheet you can scroll to the end of.

What to skip

Utility classes shine when every view is a one-off. They get noisy when the same card appears twice and the class list becomes the design. A class named .card is easier to change than twelve spacing utilities copied between files.

If a rule exists only to cancel another rule, delete both and write the one you meant.

Keep it local

VanillaHTML sites should look designed, not generated. A short CSS file is part of that. You can print it, argue with it, and ship it without a pipeline. The browser already knows how to load a stylesheet. Let it.