Scaling Design Systems Without Losing Soul
Introduction
Design systems are essential for scaling product development. They ensure consistency, improve efficiency, and reduce redundant decision-making. But as systems mature, a new problem emerges: the soul of the product—the spark of creativity, personality, and brand differentiation—can begin to fade.
How do we scale structure without killing expression? How do we keep the UI recognizable, not robotic? This is the core tension in large-scale design systems.
The Risk of Over-Standardization
At scale, systems often prioritize uniformity and efficiency over flexibility. While this minimizes inconsistency, it can also:
Flatten brand identity
Create sameness across unrelated products
Reduce creative autonomy
The result? Products that feel generic, rigid, or uninspired—even if they’re technically "correct."
Why Soul Matters
Design isn’t just about clarity—it’s about character. Visual language conveys emotion, voice, and values. Especially for consumer-facing brands, a lack of soul reduces memorability and emotional resonance.
But even in B2B and enterprise tools, a sense of humanity, visual delight, and ownership can boost user satisfaction, reduce fatigue, and improve long-term engagement.
Scaling Design at Miles
While Sprinklr demanded a scalable structure in a high-complexity enterprise environment, my time at Miles required preserving soul in a fast-growing consumer app. Here, delight and brand expression weren’t just nice-to-haves—they were core to retention and engagement.
At Miles, I led the development of a lightweight design system tailored for rapid experimentation and seasonal expression. We balanced consistency with creativity through:
Campaign-Specific Variants: We introduced flexible design shells that adapted for brand partners like Starbucks or Uber, allowing co-branding without diluting the core experience.
Themed Visual Language: From holiday-specific reward cards to animations that celebrated user milestones, we embedded personality directly into the system.
Atomic Components with Expression Hooks: Even though the system was modular and reusable, each component had built-in flexibility for iconography, background styles, and motion, keeping the interface playful without being chaotic.
This helped us scale marketing and partner campaigns quickly while ensuring that the app remained joyful and recognizably “Miles.”
Tactics for Keeping Personality Alive
Define the brand voice: Build a tone and personality layer into your system—voice guidelines, animation principles, mood boards.
Empower token overrides: Let teams tailor color, type, and spacing tokens where appropriate without compromising function.
Encourage experimentation: Offer pathways to contribute new patterns or propose customizations via governance models.
Build for variation: Instead of rigid rules, document examples of intentional variation.
Support layered documentation: Give product teams guidance for both utility and storytelling—how to express moments of joy, error, relief, or excitement.
Business Benefits of Keeping Soul
Stronger brand alignment across teams and platforms
Higher emotional connection with users
Greater system adoption by creatives and engineers alike
Increased innovation through structured freedom
Conclusion
Design systems should enable creativity, not suppress it. When scaled thoughtfully, they provide the scaffolding for innovation, not constraints. The key is building a system that’s not just usable, but expressive, flexible, and alive with character.
You can scale without losing soul—but only if you design for both.
