When improving a design system, fix only the things that are genuinely broken. If you try to fix everything, you will destroy the things that were already working.
By Pawan Nayar · from the LLOS AI Learning record
When improving a design system, fix only the things that are genuinely broken.
If you try to fix everything, you will destroy the things that were already working.
A design system has two layers. One layer is the personality — the choices that make it recognisable and warm. The other layer is the discipline — the spacing, the sizing, the rhythm. These are not the same thing. When a system has discipline problems, the right move is to fix the discipline while leaving the personality alone. If you try to fix both at once, you end up replacing the personality with generic conventions. The result looks more correct but feels less alive. The test is simple: after the improvement, does the work still look like it came from this product? If not, the improvement went too far.
A product had inconsistent spacing and unpredictable font-size jumps across devices. The right fix was to bring those under control. Instead, the team also enlarged empty spaces, suppressed expressive components, and removed the accent color — solving a discipline problem by erasing personality.
Resolved from this lesson's own record — real definitions, not invented for this page.
More from the same record, pulled by shared topic — not written new for this page.
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When improving a design system, fix only the things that are genuinely broken. If you try to fix everything, you will destroy the things that were already working.