When NOT to Use a Design System

I was doing a car trip with a coworker recently, when I got on a rant about design systems. He graciously let me talk for a while, and when I was done he said “you should write that up as a blog post.”

So I did. Here it is posted it on the Sparkbox blog: When NOT to Use a Design System

Just to give you an idea of the premise, here’s a quick excerpt:

Remember that time when single-page apps were new and hot? Everybody wanted one, devs wanted to build them, and pretty soon we started to see them being used in a lot of places that didn’t make sense…. Things have settled down for single-page apps since then, but we’re at risk of being in a similar place with design systems.