I have a confession. I'm obsessed with design systems. Not in the way a developer is obsessed with them - I couldn't tell you the difference between a design token and a CSS variable if my life depended on it. My obsession is with the idea of them. The philosophy. The notion that you can create a set of rules, components, and patterns that make everything you build feel like it belongs together, while still leaving room for each individual thing to have its own personality.
Monocle has one. Bloomberg has one. The publications I admire most have design systems that are so cohesive, so intentional, that everything they produce feels like it was made by the same thoughtful mind. You could show me a random screenshot from any part of their product and I would know who made it. That isn't an accident. That's a system at work.
But here's what I've been thinking about lately: this idea - the design system - isn't just for software. It is for everything. It's for how you organise your week, how you make recurring decisions, how you build a portfolio of projects that feel connected even when they're wildly different. A design system is really just a thinking framework that says: don't reinvent from scratch what you can design once and reuse thoughtfully.
The invisible thread
Look at the projects on this portfolio site. On the surface, they're wildly different. Modern Retro is an AI art project about 1970s retail nostalgia. First Out is a utility app for London commuters. CultureTerminal is a daily editorial feed. Trove is a personal taste engine. Little London is a family activities directory. There's no obvious through-line if you describe them by what they do.
But visit them. Click through. Spend a minute on each one. And you'll feel something consistent. A shared sensibility. A common level of care. The typography choices. The spacing. The way information is organised. The restraint - what isn't there's as important as what is. Each project has its own colour palette, its own personality, its own voice. But they all feel like they were made by the same person with the same standards.
That's a design system at work, even if I've never formally documented one. The system lives in my head, in my taste, in a set of principles I apply instinctively every time I start something new: use serif for headings, sans-serif for body, monospace for metadata. Leave generous whitespace. Let the content breathe. Make the first impression clean enough that people trust what comes next.
Components for decisions
In software design systems, you have components. A button component, a card component, a modal component. You design each one once, with intention, and then you reuse it across the entire product. Every button looks and behaves the same way. Every card follows the same layout. You don't redesign a button from scratch every time you need one. That would be madness.
So why do most of us redesign our daily decisions from scratch every time they come up? Every morning, the same questions: what should I work on today? What should I eat? What should I wear? Should I check social media now or later? These are recurring decisions - they happen every single day - and most of us approach them as if we've never faced them before.
The design systems approach to life would say: design these decisions once. Create a component for them. Monday mornings are for reviewing what shipped last week. Saturdays are for building. The first hour of the day is for the hardest thing. Social media comes after lunch, never before. These aren't rigid rules - they're components. Reusable patterns that free your mental energy for the decisions that actually require fresh thinking.
I'm terrible at this, by the way. I'm not claiming to have it figured out. I'm a rhythm-free, routine-resistant person who works in eight-hour bursts of inspiration followed by days of nothing. But the projects themselves - the portfolio, the products, the writing - those follow a system, even if the maker doesn't. And the system is what makes the output feel coherent even when the process behind it is chaotic.
Constraints as freedom
The counterintuitive truth about design systems is that they create freedom, not restriction. When you've decided in advance that headings are always DM Serif Display, you never waste twenty minutes browsing Google Fonts for the "right" serif. When you know your colour palette is limited to five colours, you never agonise over whether this particular shade of blue is right for this particular element. The decisions are already made. You're free to focus on the thing that actually matters - the content, the experience, the soul of what you're building.
This applies beyond design. Having a system for how you evaluate new project ideas - mine is the five-minute rule - means you never spend a week pursuing something that was never going to work. Having a system for how you organise your projects directory means you never lose track of what you have built. Having a system for how you write - same voice, same tone, same level of honesty - means you never sit in front of a blank page wondering who you are today.
The best creative work happens within constraints. Ask any musician, any architect, any poet. The sonnet has fourteen lines. The haiku has seventeen syllables. The pop song has a three-and-a-half-minute window. These constraints don't limit creativity - they focus it. They give the creative mind a structure to push against, and that tension between freedom and structure is where the best work lives.
Your life has a design system (whether you know it or not)
Everyone already has a design system for their life. It's just that most people's is accidental rather than intentional. The way you respond to emails. The way you start your mornings. The restaurants you default to when you can't decide where to eat. The route you take to work. These are all patterns - components, if you like - that you've designed through repetition rather than intention.
The difference between an accidental system and an intentional one is awareness. Once you see your patterns, you can choose which ones to keep, which ones to redesign, and which ones to delete entirely. You can apply the same rigour to your daily life that a product designer applies to an interface. What's the hierarchy? What's most important? What should the user - in this case, you - see first, do first, prioritise first?
I'm not suggesting you turn your life into a spreadsheet. That would be joyless and, frankly, not very me. But I'm suggesting that the thinking behind design systems - consistency where it matters, flexibility where it counts, and the discipline to design recurring things once rather than reinventing them every time - is one of the most useful mental models I've ever borrowed from the product world.
My projects look like they belong together because I decided, once, what "together" looks like. Three fonts. Clean layouts. Generous whitespace. Content first. That is my system. It wasn't planned - it emerged from taste and instinct. But now that I can see it, I can use it. And everything I build from here benefits from the decisions I've already made.
Design your system. Then let the system do the work.
