A spherical $t$-design is a finite subset $X$ of the unit sphere such that every polynomial of degree at most $t$ has the same average over $X$ as it does over the entire sphere. Determining the minimum possible size of spherical designs, especially in a fixed dimension as $t \to \infty$, has been an important research topic for several decades. This paper presents results on the complementary asymptotic regime, where $t$ is fixed and the dimension tends to infinity. The main results in this paper are (1) a construction of smaller spherical designs via an explicit connection to Gaussian designs and (2) the exact order of magnitude of minimal-size signed $t$-designs, which is significantly smaller than predicted by a typical degrees-of-freedom heuristic. We also establish a method to ``project'' spherical designs between dimensions, prove a variety of results on approximate designs, and construct new $t$-wise independent subsets of $\{1,2,\dots,q\}^d$ which may be of independent interest. To achieve these results, we combine techniques from algebra, geometry, probability, representation theory, and optimization.