It was consistent. It was documented. Three other studios asked to license it. And it was quietly making everything we shipped look like everything else we shipped.

Consistency is a tool, not a virtue

A design system optimises for the thing it can measure: how fast you can assemble a page that does not look broken. It cannot measure whether that page is worth looking at. After eighteen months, ours had become the shortest path to a competent, forgettable layout — and the shortest path is the one tired people take on a Thursday.

What we replaced it with

Tokens, not components. Colour, type scale, spacing rhythm and motion curves are locked. Composition is not. Every project now starts from a blank artboard and a palette, which is slower by about a day and better by considerably more than a day.

What we would keep

The motion tokens. Nobody has ever looked at a site and thought the easing curves were too consistent.