Five mistakes teams make with design systems
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit design systems.
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
- Assuming someone else already owns it
- A shared component set stops every page reinventing the same button
- Tokens for colour, spacing, and type keep decisions consistent
- Never checking whether the fix actually worked
The system pays for itself around the third or fourth page. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
Where to go from here
In practice
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about design systems before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- The system pays for itself around the third or fourth page — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.