Design principles (DPs) have been recognized as a central contribution in Design Science Research and the research community has begun acknowledging their importance. Much of this work implicitly assumes that design principles are natural components of contributions that can easily be derived by researchers without a need for criteria for their proposal, application or evaluation. In this paper we infer a framework for how to expose the conceptual structure of DPs as both components and sole contributions. We find a danger in assuming that design principles alone are contributions as they are very broadly used to propose utility yet the specific target audience or the explicit use of them as components of design theory occur less frequent. Furthermore, by applying our framework to a set of DPs, we offer four parts of their conceptual structure that can be used to convey the nature of design principle contributions and further identify potential areas for improvement or further research. We derive 8 questions that offer a guiding hand to researchers who attempt to embed DPs as components of their contribution either to research or to practice. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.