Make excellence usable.

A great design system makes expert judgment available to an entire team. Every function has its equivalents: examples, conventions, context, and standards that deserve to be written down, modeled, and maintained.

In practice

At Coval, customer-facing materials used to look different depending on who made them. Our lead designer wrote down the conventions behind good work as a design system, and the whole team’s output got more unified and more polished almost overnight. I now ask every function the same question: what does an experienced colleague know that the rest of the system keeps having to rediscover? Then I ask for two examples, one excellent and one that plausibly missed the point, and the explanation of the difference.

The tradeoff

Codified practice preserves a bad habit as efficiently as a good one, and instructions written for one model can become dead weight on the next. So the guidance gets an owner, a freshness check, and a separate assignment to challenge it. Following the standard and improving the standard are different jobs, and the instructions should say which one is underway.

Go deeper

Make excellence available to the work in the field guide.