Hot take: Design systems kill good typography choices

I've been building design systems for 3 years now. On one side, I get it. Consistency rules. Devs love having spacing and type scale locked in. No more random 14px here, 16px there. But lately I've been seeing the same thing over and over. Every site starts looking like every other site. Same Inter or Roboto font. Same 4 heading sizes. Same line heights. Over 6 months at my last job, we shipped 12 new pages and every single one used the exact same type hierarchy. No personality. No surprises. My old portfolio from 2019 used Playfair Display and looked unique. Now everything feels like a template. Am I wrong for thinking design systems are making the web boring?

2 comments

2 Comments

diana_bell741d ago

Just lock in 2-3 expressive fonts for headers and keep the boring system font for body copy.

eric3591d ago

Three years ago I was downloading 8 different fonts per project. Your post made me realize I was just making it harder on everyone reading the site. Now I just pick two good display fonts and leave the rest as Arial.