Nicely put together. I especially liked the part about not comparing design systems to one another. Every company is different and has different needs. An e-commerce site has different goals than IBM, so copying Carbon would be applying mismatched principles.

A design system shouldn’t really come from “copying” someone, but rather from research of what works and what doesn’t for that particular product or service. And that can differ both within a category, and within a specific product.

The general rules of design elements, documentation and code components can be used in an infinite number of ways as long as they do what they were intended to do.

I’m currently building a design system for the online part of a newspaper and that has it’s own challenges. If I copied a SaaS design system it would most likely be quite unreadable.

Thanks again, great read.