On Design Systems and Taste
Design systems are great at enforcing consistency. They're terrible at preserving taste. The two are not the same thing — and conflating them is how good products go beige.
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The pitch is always the same: consistency at scale, faster shipping, one source of truth. All true. All worth pursuing. But there's a side effect nobody talks about in the conference talks: design systems, left unguarded, drain personality from products. They reward compliance over judgment. They make it easy to assemble something that looks designed without anyone having made a single real design decision.
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A design system can make every screen consistent and every screen mediocre simultaneously. Consistency means sameness. Quality means rightness. They overlap, but they're not identical. A component library full of passable components shipped consistently is still a passable product.
A great design system is a platform for taste, not a replacement for it. It should make it easier to make good decisions, not eliminate the need to make them.
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The things a system should never decide for you
The things a design system should handle: spacing scales, colour tokens, type ramps, component states, accessibility baselines. The things it should never decide for you: hierarchy within a screen, emphasis choices, when to break the grid, when an illustration serves better than an icon, when silence is the right answer. These are judgment calls. They require a designer in the room with an opinion. Systematising them away doesn't make your product better — it makes it safer and duller.
I once audited a product where the team was proud that 100% of screens used system components. Every screen was also profoundly boring.
[FRUSTRATED]I once audited a product where the team was proud that 100% of screens used system components. Every screen was also profoundly boring.
[FRUSTRATED]The best design systems I've worked with had a Figma file and a person. The file had the components. The person had the taste. You need both.
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Design tokens are genuinely powerful. Theming, multi-brand systems, dark mode — none of it scales without tokens. But I've seen teams spend six months perfecting their token architecture and ship a product that feels generic. The tokens were immaculate. The design decisions that used those tokens were safe. Safe is not good. Tokens give you leverage. Leverage magnifies whatever judgment is behind it — good or bad.
The system I aspire to build is one that makes the right thing the easy thing, not the only thing. It should be faster to make a good decision than a bad one. But it should always preserve the possibility of the brilliant exception — the bespoke treatment, the unexpected moment, the one screen that earns the right to look different because it has something important to say.
Designer and builder — I prototype to learn what's possible, then refine until it ships. Systems-thinking, hands-on builds, and interfaces people remember.
