Establish your design system foundations before building layouts – you’re simply implementing the system you’ve already created rather than inventing solutions on the fly. Your layout settings must be configured first since changes to these affect all templates.
Set content size, wide size, root padding, root padding aware alignments, and block spacing before template building. Changes to these fundamental settings can cause unwanted side effects across existing layouts.
Configure your spacing palette (padding, margin values), font sizes, and color palette. Consistent design tokens prevent the maintenance nightmare of random values scattered throughout your layouts.
While you’ll inevitably need additional design tokens during development, having the core system established prevents the unmaintainable approach of arbitrary styling decisions that plague many WordPress sites.