The premise
Most design systems exist to keep a company consistent. This one exists to be handed over for community use. It assumes you'll change it — your colours, your words, your needs — and there's no upstream to answer to when you do.
This is for self-organising groups of all kinds: housing cooperatives, mutual aid networks, repair cafés, countercultural collectives, grassroots campaigns, and so on.
seedbank.design has three principles at its core.
Designed for the edges, not the centre. It works where the budget doesn't stretch: on e-ink, in print, on a slow connection, on a server running off a solar panel. And you shouldn't have to be a designer or a developer to read it.
Honest uncertainty over false precision. A number you only half-trust is worse than a range you understand. So uncertainty stays in the interface instead of being hidden from it: ranges in place of invented decimals, methodology you can open and read, gaps left visible rather than filled in. No reassuring green badge without a reason behind it.
Collective agency, not individual surveillance. The data is about the group, never the person. There are no per-user breakdowns and no individual alerts (that's the line where a tool for organising quietly becomes a tool for watching). Every figure is tied to a decision it's meant to help you make. Information you can't act on is just noise.
This is what "honest" looks like
A reading with its range, not a false single figure — and the workings underneath, if you want them.
Produce redistributed — autumn share
240 kg
estimated 180–310 kg
How this was calculated
Weighed at the redistribution table across the season's eleven share days, then totalled. Covers everything that passed over the table.
Produce taken straight from plot to kitchen is never weighed, so the real figure is higher than this — the estimate undercounts rather than guesses.
Source: share-day logbook, kept by the harvest rota.
How it works
seedbank.design is a template. Click Use this template in GitHub and you get your own repository: a complete copy you can take in any direction. There's no package to update, no upstream to track, no permission to ask.
The code is MIT. The design and tokens are CC BY-SA 4.0. Neither asks anything of your fork. Recolour it, rename a component, throw half of it away — it's yours now.
It's plain HTML and CSS — no framework and no build step. If you can edit a stylesheet, you can make it yours.
What you get
Five layers, each building on the one below.
- Foundations — focus, type, links, dividers, lists.
- Controls — buttons, inputs, checkboxes, selects, radios.
- Display — badges, tables, code.
- Patterns — cards, form fields, activity badges.
- Ecological — eco-stats, methodology, verification, provenance, resource bars.
The ecological layer is the heart of it: components for showing honestly what a community grows, shares, repairs and makes. It's the reason the system exists, not an add-on.
Start where you are
The coded system is complete and tested. A Figma library and a single-file version for AI design tools are on the way.
Built something with it? Add yourself to MADE_WITH.md.