February 28, 2026
By Marcus Feldt
5 min read
Design systems that survive their first redesign
Most systems rot within a year. The ones that last share three habits, and none of them are about tooling.
Most design systems are abandoned within a year of being built. Not because the components were wrong, but because nobody could answer a simple question six months later: where does this new thing go?
A system is a set of decisions, not a set of files
A library of buttons is not a design system. The system is the written record of why there are three button styles and not seven, what each one is for, and what to do when a page seems to need a fourth. Teams that keep only the files end up with the seventh button by the end of the quarter.
If a new component can be added without anyone having to justify it, you do not have a system. You have a folder.
Three habits, none of them about tooling
The systems that last share the same three habits. Every component has a named owner who reviews additions. Every token has a reason recorded next to it, so the next person can tell an intentional value from an accident. And the system is versioned with the product rather than beside it, so drift shows up as a failing build instead of a slow argument.
None of that requires a particular tool. We have seen it work in Figma and in a folder of hand-written CSS, and we have seen it fail in both.