Constraints beat documentation. How we shape editor blocks so off-brand layouts are impossible.
Every design system we have inherited came with a style guide nobody had read since onboarding. The layouts still drifted. Documentation asks people to remember; constraints do not.
Remove the options that cause the damage
A block should expose the decisions that are genuinely editorial and hide the ones that are design decisions already made. Padding is not an editorial decision. Neither is brand colour, heading scale or image ratio. Give an editor two spacing steps and three background tones and the page cannot go wrong.
Design the empty state on purpose
Most block libraries look correct only when fully populated. Real pages are half-filled on a Friday afternoon. Every block we ship has a defined behaviour with missing content — it collapses cleanly rather than leaving a hole — and that single rule removes most of the “the site looks broken” tickets.
The test is simple. Hand the library to someone who has never seen the brand and ask them to build a page badly. If they cannot, the constraints are right.